


Antediluvium

by Kendrix



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-28
Packaged: 2018-10-08 21:12:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 64,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10396272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kendrix/pseuds/Kendrix
Summary: The Doctor explores an ancient city by himself, taking his sweet time to uncover the secrets of its long, long history.  Set somewhere between "The Caretaker" and "Kill the moon". Mentions of numerous characters; Implied whouffle if you squint but mostly original space exploration. First in the possible Nautilus Fantasia Series.





	1. Day 1


    "I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the
    ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air
    for I am sorry that I have made them.  I will send rain upon
    the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing
    that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground.
    And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the
    earth.  On that day all the fountains of the great deep burst
    forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.  And rain
    fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.  The ark
    floated on the face of the waters, and all flesh died that
    moved upon the earth.  Birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming
    creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man.  Only Noah
    was left, and those that were with him in the ark.  Then he
    sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided
    from the face of the ground.  Then he waited another seven
    days, and sent forth the dove, and she did not return to him
    any more."
    Where did the bird land?  Or maybe it weakened and was
    swallowed by the waters, no one could know.  So the people
    waited for her return, and waited and grew tired of waiting.
    They forgot they had released the bird, even forgot there was a
    bird and a world sunken under water.  They forgot where they had
    come from, how long they had been there, and where they were
    going so long ago that the animals have turned to stone.  The
    bird I saw, I can't even remember where or when, it was so long
    ago.  Perhaps it was a dream.  Maybe you and I and the fish
    exist only in the memory of a person who is gone.  Maybe no one
    really exists and it is only raining outside.  Maybe the bird
    never existed at all.“
    -From Mamoru Oshii's 'Angel's egg'.

 

 

Day 1

 

Overlooking the cityscape before him, his ring glittering at its usual place on the long fingers he was using to secure his position, holding on to the edge of the hatch he'd climbed through, the lone wanderer found himself wondering if this was one of those rare moments where he came close to catching a glimpse of how the sight in front of his eyes would appear to most people -

The sight of spires and no sound was a wordless oxymoron deserved of at least the vague ghost of a passing shiver, even – or especially – from a scion of an advanced civilization.

He had not spent his earliest years in such a city, but he'd been taken to study in one at the age of eight, and while the citadel of the Time Lords was never a place that could have been described as loud or bustling, the difference between a place where living was happening slowly and reverently, and one where nothing lived at all was still remarkable.

He supposed that for someone who was less used to sights and places like this, the silence would have been oppressive or majestic – To him, it was, by now, a fairly familiar phenomenon, the way the lack of any other sounds exaggerated awareness of slight noises he might otherwise barely perceive, chiefly, those he was personally the cause of, his footfalls, the layers of his clothing moving over each other or scraping against his surroundings in close quarters, his breathing and the other various sounds of living, and any littlest ambient sound too slight, or too far away, to be assigned clear interpretations – On the surface, at least, there was the wind, and possibly the occasional gerbil – but even before coming here, he'd been aware that the structures extended at the very least as far into the ground as above it, and after some days of investigation, he'd come to conclude that the towers were merely the tips of the iceberg, while the enormous underground complex was, in fact, where most of the city – and most of its long history – waited to be discovered.

 

 


	2. Day 2

Day 2

 

 

Despite their abandoned state, the tall, interconnected structures before him were not ruins; What lay before him beneath the pale light of an overcast sky was the metropolis of Xalax on the planet of Fabron, once one of the largest, most illustrious cities for most of the planet's civilized history, and also one of the oldest – Having been densely populated since its beginnings as a major trade hub, thousands of years in the past, its spires were now empty, abandoned centuries ago after one war too many, and never reclaimed after it was placed in a neutral zone between two factions, ironically because its symbolic and religious significance was too large for any faction to concede defeat if the city were awarded to another – According to most of the major religions, a large natural cavern beneath even the lowest reaches of the tunnels was where life had first originated, and where their goddess' remains had been buried after she was finished with creating the universe and dotting it with life, much like a woman dying in childbirth.

The citizens of Fabron, then, were her last and unintentional creation, having spontaneously sprung from her blood, and built the city to be her grave-marker.

The very presence of underground complexes and life on other planets in the legend made it apparent and, in the Doctor's opinion, fairly obvious that the story wasn't even as old as the city it was supposed to explain, but being himself a scion of a civilization that had been advanced for so long that even its legendary founders lived in a world with space flight, and having seen it chose the leadership of that tyrant of the past over that of a vastly more competent young woman, it didn't surprise him that the legend was believed, and led to the very thing it was setting up to be treasured being left barren.

But while no Fabronian had set foot in the city's premises for a long, long time, their ancestors' ingenious advanced technology stood the test of time, leaving Xalax and other sites like it as the last monuments to this world's former glory in the days before reckless wars tore it apart – All the machinery, automatic devices, household appliances and urban transport facilities were, in fact, still working, waiting for someone to give them a reason to activate - With a natural life span of about 300 years, the Fabronians had some motivation to built long-lasting infrastructure to begin with, and Xalax was, in its day, the planet's jewel, it's capital, it's oldest, largest, most modern creation of its inhabitants, often hailed as Fabron's 'eternal city', later hailed as Fabron's Rome by the first human explorers to reach the planet, which might have _almost_ been accurate, if Rome had magically morphed into Tokyo at some point in its history, and then suffered its designated fate in almost every other Sci-Fi movie, and become known as a kind of Atlantis that somehow still had a widely known physical location.

Except that Xalax had been preemptively evacuated in the days of its fall, not a single bomb had tarnished its structures, and since his arrival here, he'd had the chance to personally try out what sort of computers the Xalaxians were using, what video games they played, how they had showered and moved around the city in hover pads and train-like structures, had access to actual water, read some of their books and downloaded entire libraries to the TARDIS computer, knowing that no one else might ever come to access these documents, and the fraction of Fabronian thought, art and culture contained therein.

He treated himself to the music they had turned to in their last days, highly electronic like their architecture, make to resemble scrambled or corrupted data through they were not.

Most of the city, from the spires to the lower regions, was in fact still fully habitable, a monument for their builder's reliance and cherishing of technology above more perishable materials: Much of the city was made of the same, blueish-white material that appeared in state resembling crystal or carved stone with a pearly glimmer to it, and everything within its walls had obeyed the will of the inhabitants – Some buildings didn't even have doors, just walls that would slide open if an authorized person gestured toward it. When they'd left, most of them had carelessly discarded the curious small crystals they'd uses as keys or means of recognition, worn around their wrists or necks in decorated studs.

He still hadn't been able to determine what they were made of (which, together with the fact he'd needed to reconfigure his equipment _at all_ was probably a huge testament to the city's occupants and their ingenuity), but figured out how to configure his sonic screwdriver to emulate their signals a few hours after his arrival, and then, he could make the infrastructure obey _him_ , too, and basically invite himself to a comfortable holiday while he investigated the place to his hearts' content, stopping in the nearest abandoned apartment whenever he needed anything.

A childish little part of him felt unexpectedly elated at having this whole, gigantic complex all to himself, all the little catwalks, all the hidden rooms, the sanctums of their temples and the assembly rooms and offices of the richest and most influential members of their society, all the places little boys weren't allowed in, every playground he was supposed to be too old for, and nobody to tell him “No”, nobody to stop him from taking anything he wanted because nobody would ever miss it.

He had vague memories of going on longer explorations like that by himself sometime after the events at the Medusa cascade, of visiting environments that would have been too harsh for Donna, Martha, Rose or Mickey and, after having traveled in the company of humans almost continuously for a long while, feeling newly-reminded of how little he actually needed to get by now that he didn't have them with him. Back then, he recalled it as a horrible feeling, like they had been more alive than he was, and he a ghost haunting the ruins of a lost civilization that should long have faded and gone to face the others where his judgment awaited, not that he expected it to be anything other than oblivion. He almost thought that if he didn't keep moving or talking to himself, he might just forget that he was supposed to be alive and stay standing there like a tree or a statue, fading so slowly it might be mistaken for static as the birds and insects that lived in its branches hatched, mated and died.

In cynical retrospective, he's tempted to quip that a far more likely cause of death on his part would have been to find the embrace of madness in the wide expanse, or alternatively, good ol' Sandshoes being too distracted by all the shiny around him to notice dehydration or prolonged exposure creeping up on him ever so slowly, leaving the natives to discover him and wonder what absurdly skinny creature that skeleton could have belonged to.

By now, the events of Trenzalore had given him a much-needed reminder of his own ultimate mortality, and after having lacked the strength to venture all too far beyond the bell tower of Christmas Town for several decades and having consigned the idea of walking down the boulevards of Xalax before their eventual destruction to the heap of impossible pipe dreams, this chance to stride through the wide, resplendent streets in the shadow of the spires, to run his hands over handrails and columns, filled him with a boyish, heady gratitude that he actually allowed himself to express with a thin smile now that he was all by himself, a drive to move about in absolute freedom as an island unto himself that he hadn't felt this strongly since his oversized-scarf-wearing days, distantly related to the heady joy of dancing by himself in the mirror or singing in the shower.

The towers looked all the more pompous from down here, he had to actually lay down to see their tips from the ground level, just sitting down of craning his neck wouldn't do.

Centuries ago, this would have been a busy, crowded street, reserved for pedestrians given that the public transport took place in the interconnections of the towers above, but now, no one was stopping him from folding his hands behind his neck and simply leaning back in the middle of it, to stare up the various buildings.

Though this place couldn't have been more different, the inner city reminded him of that of an older European town, where you could assign the various buildings their approximate age based on the art style used, maybe you'd have a gothic church next to a baroque castle, a few art nouveau houses next to an engineer style train station or, depending on which part of Europe it was, a functional concrete building dating from the communist era – The Xalaxian spires, similarly, came in various distinct styles as well, some of them roughly rectangular in geometric forms, with rectangular or cylindrical protrusions, openly displayed tube sections and colorful statues interplaying with billboards; Others, contrary to what one might think, the later ones, resembled asparagus rods with many, many windows, ending in spiral tops or hazelnut shaped glass domes composed of multiple, petal-like pieces, their material lighter and their surface smoother – Some, owing to rival art styles existing at the time, had ring- or column like decorations instead of a purely cylindrical surface, others were sightly convex or concave in form with elaborate reliefs full of pictograms, and those became more and more common the closer you came to the central area.

Sometimes the skies would be overcast or it would rain, and then, the drops would slide past the surface of the material like from the leaves of a lotus plant; Once, lights must have burned in each of the tiny windows that covered the towers, but now, there was not even a fire burning for miles and miles, so the sky was so clear, so free from any other sources of lights that the disk of the Nevetina-Galaxy could be seen as a clear, milky stripe across the sky, a bit more yellow and distinctly broader than what you'd see on secluded places on Earth, the fluffy, cloud-like outline of a nearby dwarf Galaxy being visible on the edge.

He'd been here twice before, once on a previous visit to Fabron, in a time where these towers no longer stood and the atmosphere was too infused with toxic fumes to see anything but eerie silvery mist at night, and another time, to keep this Galaxy from becoming a battleground in the Time War. He'd succeeded at destroying the site that had been of strategic interest and convinced both human & local authorities to back his efforts, including various advanced locals that had been none too friendly with each other before, but at the price of fourteen star systems full of mostly human colonists, among them, a short brown-haired girl who'd given him shelter at her family's farm when none of the other villagers were willing to go near a Time Lord without torches and pitchforks, and later volunteered to assist him in his endeavors. Since he'd refused to give her a name to call him by, she'd quickly glimpsed at the battered leather jacket he had been wearing, and nicknamed him “Captain Nemo” after a character in a book she'd been reading, even commenting at a later point that her own role was quite a bit like that of Professor Aronax, curious about the mysterious solitary stranger and the life he led in the depths of the ocean, but also increasingly concerned about the personal vendetta he seemed to be pursuing at all costs; His vehement protests against the “Captain” part only seemed to encourage her.

– This Galaxy wouldn't have continued to exist without _her_ efforts, either, but the great services she'd rendered to her people and all those they shared this galaxy with had not saved her own life, and at the end of this particular adventure, he'd been the one to pick up her charred corpse – Charred, alas, by the orbital weapons of a battle TARDIS, not a Dalek saucer – and tried in vain to make out her last few raspy words.

It was ironic, in a way, because she'd asked about the bandolier he'd been wearing, and he'd told her that it belonged to someone he'd tried to save, that he wore it to remind himself. It seemed to him that, if he was getting close to someone and allowing himself to forget that he was a monster, another remainder might have been too overdue to be evitable.

He'd laid her to rest in the burnt soil where her little colonist village had once been, on a planet so devastated it would never carry life again, a region of space so distorted by anomalies it came to be known as the 'blasted lands' and remained inaccessible to most forms of hyperspace travel for decades – even centuries after, by then casually referred to as simply the badlands after memory of the longer-lived races would call the 'grand devastation' for ages, had mostly faded from living memory in the younger ones, it remained impassable enough to become a popular hideout for criminals, refugees and anyone wishing to boast of their piloting skills.

Now, over a thousand years later, he had a pretty good guess at what the last of its legitimate citizens had been trying to tell him.

(“Run you clever boy, and remember.”)

He'd been thinking of taking a longer cruise across this Galaxy, a Galaxy whose history would have been erased, its future lost, if hadn't been for his intervention. As a general idea, limiting his scope might lead him to look at things he might otherwise have skipped right past because there was just so much to pick from in this whole wide universe – but what he found on his first visit had promptly dissuaded him, or at least, lead him to postpone this for what could have been indefinitely if he'd met his final end on Trenzalore, or Lake Silencio, or the Naismith Mansion for that matter –

For back then he'd begun his visit on this very same planet, under this very same sky – but when the gray clouds parted during the daytime, the material of the towers would shimmer in the colors of the sun and the sky, and, owing to some details in the composition of the atmosphere and the star heating it, that was mainly red, yellow or orange.

 


	3. Day 3

 

Day 3

 

It wasn't just the sky that reminded him of home, however, for one thing, there was the proudly-displayed, relatively advanced technology level. The futuristic devices were _everywhere_ , they were something that must have existed for a long time, not just a newfangled thing reserved for the rich and eschewed by the distrustful.

The showers he'd used were sonic, and in the time he'd needed for basic cleaning, the automatic, drawyer-like contraption he'd stuffed his clothes into had opened up and revealed his jacket, jumper, hoodie, trousers, socks and question-marked undergarments, all squeaky-clean. The only thing he'd really had to bring was his razor, seeing as the inhabitants of the city either didn't grow beards, didn't shave them, or perhaps placed very great emphasis on shaving so that each and every man within the walls of Xalax had taking his utensils with him when the place was evacuated. In any case, he didn't find anything resembling a shaving tool in the many dwellings he broke into, which led him to theorize that they hadn't been needed. After all, the Fabronians had even dispensed with the need to do their hair in the morning, since they'd slept suspended in anti-grav-pods, which probably did their backs and necks a lot of favors, but would also have flaunted the efficiency of their power sources to any outside visitors who might have wondered how they could use electricity so frivolously.

He'd even had a chance to sample the local cuisine from a still-working synthesizer, long after the recipes had faded from living memory, and had to suppress an involuntary cringe – There were plenty of 'traditional' dishes available, from earlier in the city's history, from numerous other parts of the planet, even a handful very basic things from neighboring the neighboring star systems, but the most popular thing, hands down, were everything-flavored nutrition blocks-

 

He'd never known if Leela ever fully adapted to those, or if it all ended with her and Andred both subsisting on random little animals she'd caught.

He wouldn't put it past her.

He still had a machine for making those lying around in the TARDIS somewhere, hadn't used it in centuries – while he made an effort to endear it to Ian and Barbara, that lasted until the two of them made the decision to go buy some Earth fruits for Vicky, who probably hadn't seen very many of these while she had been stranded on Dido with a murderous psychopath.

So, the next time they were lucky enough to land on a human colony world, Barbara returned with a basket full of mostly Strawberries (Vicky's favorite), but also a variety of other fruits, and, of course, he'd been invited to try them, too. After being distinctly unimpressed by a pear and an undefined smaller citrus fruit whose exact type he no longer remembered, Ian convinced him to give a Banana a try – Back then, he hadn't unlearned that Time Lord pompousness to an extent that would have allowed him to express the phenomenon on his taste buds with a response more enthusiastic than, “Mh, these are indeed quite good, my boy.” and the “Yes, indeed.” that followed when he sampled the strawberries, but let's just say that the 20th century teachers never found out where all fruits kept disappearing to so quickly.

Vicky _did,_ because she had more or less the same idea as him, which, sooner or later, ended in two TARDIS occupants making a stealthy late-night trip to the fruit bowl at the same time.

Of course, he'd just raised his index finger in a quick shh!-gesture to his lips, and she'd nodded with a mischievous glint in her eyes and quietly extracted her strawberries –

_Those were the days._

If that synthesizer could think and actually perceive him browsing to the 'favorites' of its previous owner, it might be thinking the same. The Fabronians had never quite reached the level of technology where one could just input the name of a random dish and get their nutrition blocks with that exact flavor, instead there was a fixed, if fairly broad selection to choose from.

(That's when it quite bluntly occurred to him that he still missed Vicky.

After _at least_ sixteen centuries, _he still missed Vicky._ )

One way to tell that the inhabitants of this city had been using these for years was that the various colorful bricks weren't ordered by whatever flavor of food they were supposed to be imitating, but by functionality first – Depending on how much physical activity you did or didn't participate in, you needed a different dosage of nutrients and calories, there was everything from the equivalent of a light sugary snack to boost your alertness and a little orange cube that was supposed to keep a grown man sated and on his feet for a full day of physically strenuous work – judging by his favored selections, the last occupant of these quarters had been an average-sized 150 year old male with a desk job, working late hours, judging from his very habitual reliance on mild, caffeine-like stimulants in the morning, and what else could he possibly deduce?

Ah, of course. Dark skin, probably a sort of smoky taupe. Meticulous, too, given that he'd adjusted the precise dosage of certain vitamins with light-dependent synthesis paths for his very in-doorsy life style, just a difference of micrograms, as expected from an office drone.

As he clicked through the 'menu', the Doctor had half a mind to gather up some random knickknacks from the nearby storage units and see if he could go back in time, follow this guy to wherever he'd evacuated to back in the day, and bring him back his stuff, less because of any consideration that the man might terribly miss his fine robes, his cleaning robot and that little flowerpot whose contents had long since crumbled away, than simply to see if he'd guessed right.

(Then again, the flowerpot, despite its relatively simple design, looked like it had been painted in colorful varnish by hand, unusual in a place where everything was made by robots and no one lifted a finger anymore. It certainly hadn't been made by any sort of professional, the application of the varnish was so laughably amateurish, its thickness so uneven, that some of it had cracked and fallen off over the centuries. The pattern it was supposed to form was pretty crude, too, like something made by a small child. )

That they could precisely adjust the composition in such a way was yet another advantage of assembling these compact little bricks from scratch by synthesizing and combining the base substances rather than processing any sort of plant or animal matter as base materials, and of course, that they were widely successful at knowing just _how_ to combine those 'ingredients' spoke volumes about their not merely intricate, but actually largely complete knowledge of the layout of their own bodies – a neat side effect to this was that these cube meals wouldn't spoil if you left them in the open for _weeks_ , and in a word where the artificial was celebrated and treated with prestige instead of used to prep up cheap products, the quality standards that people expect of anything fancily advertized set in – So there was no need to worry about any of the colorants or additives giving you cancer (at least if 'you' were an otherwise healthy Fabronian), but that was besides the point – The inhabitants of Xalax – even the Doctor wasn't sure whether to call them cooks or engineers – had done what their Gallifreyan counterparts had never quite pulled off, and turned a basic act of annoying daily maintenance such as the regular intake of artificially assembled metabolic fuel into an art form of its own – among the available choices were fancily named things like “Sphere of Destiny”, “The Cube Experience” or “Rhomboid surprise”, apparently beloved classics that the room's former owner found too fanciful for his overworked office drone tastes.

Having avoided mostly artificial menus for centuries if not millenia, apart from the occasional bit of standard fare of virtually tasteless field rations omnipresent on deep space missions or in times of prolonged interstellar war and various kinds of 20th century candy (as far as that counted), he'd found himself spontaneously overcome by a bizarre mixture of nostalgia & curiosity, and for the first time in several centuries, a fresh “Cube Experience” materialized in the city of Xalax and proved indeed pretty cubic, sort of blue on the outside and red in the middle.

The nifty little machine's investors even had the foresight to make it supply an equally square plate and something like a spoon, both highly ornate with abstract patterns at the edges, composed of a blueish-white material resembling the substance that comprised the walls.

It's consistency was agreeable enough, more granular than gelatinous, as if it broke up into rounded bits by itself when the cutlery dug into it, with the final result perhaps resembling a spoonful of pomegranate seeds or tapioca pearls, the taste, on the other hand, was nothing like what it looked like, with the closest analogue he could muster from his memory being a tea made of ginger, mint and liquorice that Clara had once served him a long, long time ago before Trenzalore, but with much more of a fruity sour-ish component and a note resembling blueberry, another thing that hardly tasted like it looked – dark blue as they were, if he could assign their taste a color it would be a warm pastel yellow.

He found himself suddenly wishing there were someone to discuss or argue with, about Fabronian cuisine, or possibly, blueberries, on some level, he thought it would be best to have someone agree with him, and that was usually the point in his undertakings where he went to get the Ponds, or visit them, or whatever. River, like most of the other potential taste-testers he could imagine at his side, would probably tease him about it and never let him hear the end of it, Rory would probably find it impossibly weird, but with Amelia, he had the firmest faith that she would most likely get it, that 'tasting colors' thing or at least the general gist of it, she was always someone who'd learned to see past the grids and demarcations of this world, who'd refused to dismiss the things others would rather ignore to have this illusion of a small, manageable world, and led her hears to the ideas and points of views no one else wanted to consider, who knew, she might even get the other two to admit that they, too, shared the unique little insights that brought the four of them together –

And just like that he'd allowed himself to forget, just for an instant, that 'going to see the Ponds' was no longer an option and had not _been_ an option for a long, long time now.

After centuries, he still hasn't managed to get it into his head, that they are gone now and forever beyond his reach – He used to go without seeing them for years, but whenever he'd felt like he was losing his battle against the encroaching darkness, cold and solitude of the world, they'd been there for him to return to, until one day, they suddenly weren't, and the suffocating _wrongness_ of that was something he might never come to terms with.

There had at least been a possibility, a sketchy blue print of a world in which they'd stayed with him for longer, and he knew because that last weeping angel had devoured it – Had he strapped that thing to an operating table and found the means to take it apart, he might even been able to calculate just how much energy the creature had acquired when it fed on those wiped-out days.

He recalled sitting by Amelia's side as she dreamed, her tiny form barely filling her bed, telling her that, in the worst case, he might wind up as a story in her head.

In the end, it had been the other way around, and she'd lived on as a story of _his_ , one of the brightest and most favorite ones, the one the children of Trenzalore had always asked him to repeat, “Please tell us! Tell us again about 'The Girl Who Waited', tell us more about the story of Amelia Pond!”

There were so many things, and places, and people most of all, that he kept a lingering tenderness toward, that the combined force of their sum was like a consuming fire, and before he knew it, that long-derailed once innocuous train of thought led him to season his plate with the salt of his teardrops, suddenly very aware that the place he was having lunch in was a long dead man's personal living space, and that apart from a variety of small rodents, he was the only living thing in a circumference of several hectares at the very least.

Massaging his forehead with a pair of fingers, he re-purposed his thumb to wipe away the leaky wetness at the corners of his eyes, a ghost of annoyance and embarrassment visible on his otherwise restrained features, and in that instant he was, of all sudden, fiercely glad that none of the aforementioned people were here to witness this unbecoming display.

(After some consideration and some prolonged poking around in the half-eaten lunch he could no longer muster much interest in, he decided to empty the dried-up contents of the little flowerpot on the floor and slip it into the right pocket.

Before the door slid closed behind him, he briefly registered the sound of the forgotten cleaning robot whirring to life, faithfully moving to clean up a mess its former owner would never care about.)

 


	4. Day 4

Day 4

 

 

So, he'd tried the food synthesizers; It would be a great deal longer until he could say the same of the sleep pods. For once, he didn't come all the way here to waste much of his time with sleeping, given that there was far more to discover here than one person could possibly explore. Since his arrival, he had pretty much been on the move non-stop, taking his sweet time in strolling from one point of interest to the next, pausing only to compulsively scribble a few cryptic, scattered notes into his journal. - He could leave the ordering and proper record-keeping for later, as any of it's results would depend on the quality of his raw data collection anyways, so it was vital that he concentrate on that.

It was only when the average sustainable quality of that concentration itself – feeble as it was these days – began to fluctuate enough to be an annoyance that he was tempted to try one, just for the sake of curiosity; In that way, even that pesky need for rest could be utilized for the sake of research.

So motivated, he'd paused on his way between a building belonging to the local university and what had probably been a hospital to sonic the entrance to one of the student dorms; The simplest accommodation available – which the authorities of Xalax had once prided themselves on giving away for free to anyone who would come to seek an education – consisted of a large room lined with sleep pods and adjacent storage spaces, with several public bathrooms accessible through nearby doors. They were mounted onto the walls in multiple rows, both along its outlines, and up to the height of the ceilings, connected by sleek ladders, in other words, these were almost bunk beds, luxury bunk beds the breadth and length of minivans – let there not be a misconception that the relatively small space indicated a lack of comfort or even privacy.

The amount of functionality that had been crammed into these pods, in practice, equating the amenities of a full room or apartment, was meant as the Xalaxian's political statement to any foreign students, the small amount of space used per student a boast of their commitment to efficiency.

The Doctor still felt that they could have improved on this if they'd had access to some basic dimensional engineering, but let's cut the Fabronians some slack.

Given that he, too, was here to learn, if not quite in the way the students had been, it didn't seem all that inappropriate for him to spend his break here.

Not satisfied with just yanking one open, he climbed one of the ladders until he'd reached the very topmost pod and slid inside to find the last occupants bags, computer terminal and clothing still occupying the storage unit, along with some decorative posters and paraphernalia that, practically enough, could be safely deposited on the shelves because the anti-gravity field only encompassed the padded middle of the unit.

There were even three personal taps installed on the side adjacent to the hall's outer walls, one for water, and another two which, through some nearby dials, could be adjusted to supply various beverages and a selection of edible sludge, the mass-production-friendly, porridge-like cousin of nutrition bricks, for anyone who was too lazy to even walk to the hypothetical canteen.

The sensation of hopping inside the capsule and stopping weightless in mid-air suspension was odd, but nothing beyond the scope of his experience; Even while awake, these cabins had the advantage that one could, for example, remain in a posture comparable to lying on one's stomach while reading books or working on some project without ever experiencing sore Elbows or anything of the sort; Suspended in the air, one could pose, stretch, even periodically move however they deemed it comfortable.

Seriously, his _own_ accommodations back in the dorms of Prydon academy hadn't been this nice, even _after_ he'd managed to wrest control of the upper bunk from the Master-to-be, though he presumed that many of his 20 th or 21st century human friends would still have been appalled at the potentially claustrophobic dimensions and relative public-ness of the individual cabins.

For now, this one would serve his purpose.

More or less: While he'd been to many places, many times, made a point of being open to many things and certainly didn't mind being surrounded by mostly technology (Having gotten used to living in such a place at the tender age of eight, and spent countless years living inside a technically huge, sentient, time-traveling cyborg-coral) this whole exercise of sleeping while floating in mid-air without any contact with things such as blankets or pillows took some getting used to – Not because the temperature was anything less than bath-tub levels of comfortable, but because of the lack of sensory input all of this meant.

The chamber was probably isolated from all outside noise as well, not that there _was_ any outside noise that would've allowed him to test this hypothesis.

He could well imagine that it was exactly _because_ of that increased isolation that the Fabronians had preferred it to the beds they'd slept on before, but with his long history and preexisting tendency toward insomnia, this just meant that he found himself far more completely alone with his own thoughts than he would have liked, and it would take a long while and many unsuccessfully applied relaxation and meditation techniques before he finally drifted out of consciousness.

He woke floating just an inch over the surface, curled up like he might have been in his mother's womb in a time so far away it felt like the age of myths, or perhaps this was better described as something closer to a dying animal finding a quiet place when it sensed that its time was near.

Uncoiling his long bony limbs, he felt vaguely fascinated that he'd still have any such instincts left inside of him; He was supposed to have been a very thoroughly processed product from a civilization that was very far removed from the mud their primitive precursors had crawled out from, people who, for better or for worse, had long since lost touch with the primal spark of their life – While there had always been rebels and dissenters, a fair share of hermits, monks and whole cultures of deviationists living in the mountains and the wilderness in the style of their faraway ancestors, (though, when it came down to it, Leela wound up practically having to them lessons in being savages before they were any good for staging a rebellion.) joining any of those had never been an option for him – For all he'd learned from the old hermit he'd met in his childhood, his family's history and legacy obliged, and he'd had too restless a nature to ever devote himself to quiet contemplation (glad as he was to have been taught its value) and far too enamored with science and technology to swear them off;

In the end, he'd been trying to do the best with what he'd been given, get the most out of his life, his mind, his body, his background and circumstance – There were only so much places in the universe with ready access to advanced, near-unlimited time travel, after all.

Whether he had succeeded, he honestly couldn't say. Whether he leaned toward 'yes' or 'no' fluctuated with his moods, and those had done a lot of fluctuating lately.

Catching his distorted half-reflection in the hull of the pod, he paused to exhale with a sigh, to lead his long, spidery fingers to the cool surface of the pod's translucent covering.

Sometimes he still had to remind himself that this nigh-cubist agglomeration of sharp, hard shapes was supposed to be him.

He was fairly certain that he'd dreamed. As it was, all things considered, probably to be expected, given that he'd spent a lot of time in a new place and accumulated much in terms of new memories, facts and impressions for his subconscious to catalog and process – but why then did the shreds of images he remembered contain little of the Xalaxian spires and so much more of a very different corner of this star-island, of skies breaking up into patterns, Dalek saucers decloaking, nimble little trails of TARDISes burning in creaking, heated skies as a crowd of human colonists begins to realize that those distant whispers of war had spoken the truth, their eyes changing, their necks craning as understanding began to set in.

Those settlers had come here looking for a simple life, their houses were of simple make, the style of their clothing, perhaps reminiscent of civil war era America, with a few modern items here and there revealing that this simplicity was by choice, but appreciation for fresh air was not going to save them now.

Not all of them realized the full scope of what was going on, some of them were awed, some of them screamed in panic, but in their midst was a brunette young woman in a simple farm girl's clothes, looking up with solemn apprehension. Next to her: A man in a battered leather jacket and a bandolier, with worn, uneven features and heavy, weathered hazel eyes.

He had not yet switched to the peaked, modern hairstyle he'd sported at the national gallery, nor fully given up on regulating the stubble around the outlines of his lower face, but his medium-length, dusty brown hair had already been interspersed with many streaks of deep silver.

(If he remembers correctly, it had been losing color by the week these days, like rays of light beginning to break through dispersing storm clouds)

In that precise moment, he'd been trying to keep up his stern, serious expression against the resignation building up in the arches of his brows – He knew exactly what this meant, what this spectacle entailed for the future of the families and communities that were now drawing closer to each other, grasping for each other's hands all around them, and though he should have been used to this out for centuries, he still felt an overwhelming powerlessness beneath the tired flutter of poems rushing to his mind, this one, taken from a comic book he'd read who-knows-when:

_The Future,_

_Pitch black_

_Head first_

Or, 'turned upon its head', 'completely backwards', such was the subtlety of the original Japanese text, the simultaneous communication of a wrongness and a feeling of being completely overwhelmed by an almighty foe, and falling, falling, falling in the blackness-

At this point in the war, any recitation of often-lauded epic descriptions of injustice had long since been overtaken by random associations from all over his life, the fragmented, dissociated, whimsical language of trauma and corrupted data files. 'Death, destroyer of worlds' did not even cross his mind as he stood before the Moment.

Yet, there were more images:

The same girl, her face contorted in anger, long hair swinging all around her, ruby lips parted to shout-

In an apron and a simple red-and-white headdress, carrying an aged silver tray with tea and malformed cookies of her own making, treading between machinery, hay and long-buried dreams with a mysterious smile, answering his silence with riddles of her own.

“They all say you're dangerous, but to me, you seem just like a normal boy.”

“ _A boy? Hardly. I haven't been any such thing for a long, long time...”_ he replies, with gravelly voice, finding the idea that he had ever been an innocent almost too ludicrous to believe. She just smiles, in a way he thinks _he_ might have done a long time ago. “Grownups are all just taller children in the end.”

But she _is_ a grownup, before her time, _most_ of the time at least – She's simply of the sort that tells the village children stories.

He thinks she has something of a priestess or a medium about her when she dances, something mystic, if such things were real; It's like she alone among the people she ostensibly happily lives with is in touch with a greater, subtler world that extends beyond the obvious.

Turning in a dress of sinful red, circling around a great fire with the other village girls, she's a fae in the woods, a selkie at the shore that can only be glimpsed for a short time, the mad passion of her feet too wild for a human to withstand – Here alone does her black soul lift its veil, here alone can her true nature be glimpsed.

It had been so long since his ears had drunk music –

if they had only met earlier, he might have asked her if she wished to see more of this big vast world.

“You will tell me _right now_ what is going on here!”

“He may not look it, but people have told me that he's a Lord of Time.”,

She says, playfully-confident with a held, mysterious smile, like she just told a secret, standing at his side with glittering eyes. He's observant enough to gather that she's probably still daunted, and much more impressed by the strange new place unfolding before her eyes, although she's hiding it well. Years ago, this might have made him smile, but the lightness in her words is poisoned by what they actually mean, unbeknownst to her, and the creeping certainty that she might very soon find out.

“That Bandolier of yours... What's the meaning behind it? And don't tell me 'to store ammunition', because I've seen how you hold it between your fingers whenever things seem to be going south.” _“It's a memento from somebody I couldn't save, to remind myself why it is that I keep going through this strife.”_

“Let me tell you something about the Daleks, Your Grace... - ...whatever horrid aberrations might dwell inside their metal shells right now, my friend here tells me they're descended from creatures not much unlike you or I, a culture of scholars even, before they discarded everything that they were to take a form that would help them win a long and desperate war – A war that has taken to the stars and now continues here, a war they bring everywhere they go. I think there's something to be learned from that. Everyone here, think really hard, about what it is that we're fighting to preserve here, and who is going to have destroyed it first at the rate that we're going – Us, or the Daleks?“

“ _I don't have a Name, nor do I have the need for one. Your Name is what you use to leave a recognizeable mark of yourself on the world, your Signature is what you put beneath the things you are proud of, and the things I have done since the beginning of this war merit nothing but shame and oblivion. Whatever it may have been long ago, the way things are going, it will be a forgotten name soon, washed away with all of the world... and it probably deserves to be.”_

“I'm not that selfish, you know? I _understand_ that my village isn't more important than this whole galaxy... but... it was them I set out to protect. It was them I was going to return to when this is over.”

“You keep saying you're a warrior, but the more time I spend with you, the less you seem like one. But you seem too good at what you're doing to be a draftee or something. Before this war broke out, what were you? Where did you work?”

She folds her hands behind her neck and she leans back, looking up at unfamiliar constellations as she waits for their marshmallows to roast over the campfire.

“You know, you could almost say that you kidnapped me. Rather like Professor Aronax.” _“Not you.”_ “Not me? Does that mean that there's been someone else whom you _did_ kidnap?”

Her hands adjusting his simple, frayed scarf, making sure that he was prepared for the snowy landscape they were about to step into – the first gesture of caring that had been directed at his person in a very very long time.

Before long, they stand before the gates of the ancient city, glowing glyphs in the walls and columns, and she takes note of some minute shift in his voice, some uniquely specific mixture of routine and wonder as he trails off to speak and speculate about the builders of what was now merely a strategic point of interest in a war that threatened to turn this Galaxy into a bloody battlefield.

“You used to be a _scholar,_ didn't you?”

And indeed: _Pitch black, head first._

That's when he'd woken, but back then, the fighting had merely continued elsewhere.

In the years to come, he'd left these disjointed images to themselves and made a point of being prosaic.

 

The universe hadn't; From the boulevards of Xalax, the string of stars extinguished by the Time War could still be seen.

He'd been there more than a thousand years ago, and yet, it would be another thousand years (in linear time), until his younger self arrived there, centuries until the Nevetiva Galaxy even saw its first human colonists.

On his second visit, the first one to Fabron, he'd seen the spires, too, but their forms were half-molten by terrific heat, further, broken settlements had gathered on top of them like layers of sediments, broken, limbless statues, rusty bath tubs filled with rainwater. He'd seen these stars, too, but it was only old light, a supply that ran out somewhere en route to Fabron, because the ceasing of their light had not reached this world yet, and likewise, the image he'd be seeing if he were outside right now would not be particularly fresh, either - “right now” could be so very, very relative.

Incidentally, he realized as he was climbing down the ladder, he had no idea if those stars would even be up, or even if they _had_ been up when he first arrived here, having taken the route _inside_ the buildings and structures between the last few points of interests he'd given a thorough viewing, mostly for practicality's sake. He hadn't bothered with a watch attuned to this time zone either, as he wouldn't be staying for long and wasn't expecting to meet anyone here who'd insist on punctuality.

He had absolutely neglected to keep track of how long he'd been wandering in the corridors, and he had even less of an idea how long he'd been asleep; Might have been longer than usual, might not have been – He certainly had no sore spots or crumpled covers to show for it, no disheveled morning hair, absolutely no physical sense of having been in the same position for long, bless these Fabronians and their ingenious technology.

He wasn't sure he felt all that rested, either, but that was a common side effect of prolonged refusal to adhere to any sort of regular sleep patterns, and something he'd learned to efficiently ignore long ago.

Then again, he no longer had any particularly solid idea for how long he'd even been here – In the ruins of Xalax _and_ the universe in general. Couldn't have been more than a week – in Xalax, obviously. Not in the world.

In any case, he supposed that it would just have been a simple number of no further use, and that it was time to stuff those washed-out memories of no further relevance back into whatever hollow or crevice they'd emerged from and head back to base.

 

 


	5. Day 5

Day 5

 

'Back to base' meant , first and foremost, 'back to where he'd left the TARDIS', although he did set up a bit of a presence around it, mostly instruments and scraps of technology that he'd dragged out of the TARDIS and assembled into bizarre blooms in the vicinity of the ship, mostly for the sake of a few preliminary scans – He was seldom one to bother with safety, but if he was going to be running around here by himself with no one to ask for directions, he'd rather know where the interesting bits were.

And while he was at it, he might as well collect data about the greater layout of the structures, their stability, density and lots of specific things – to be honest, he got a bit carried away, it had been a while since he'd gotten a chance to prove his skill in the discipline of the long-range scans or detailed general measurements in general, even if was mostly because he'd acquired a good knack for knowing what to scan for to quickly disprove or confirm a given working hypothesis.

So he set himself a challenge, mostly for it's own sake: Let's see how much pointless random data of the Xalaxian towers he could collect, at least enough to try and see if he could spot some surprising pattern in there, attempt the same by running some of his favorite classification or analysis algorithms on it, or at least make some artistic three (or more) dimensional replicas of the lost city.

For that he had, perhaps quite appropriately, set up camp in what used to be an observatory, museum, or combination there of.

He kept the TARDIS in what used to be a huge showroom of sorts, a dome of a brass-like material that could be opened to reveal the sky or used for projections, but was also engraved with a very detailed likeness of the constellations as seen from Fabron – Or what they had been like when this facility was still operating. Since the dome was too far up-high for most visitors to appreciate just how exact the engravings would have been, the Doctor surmised that this was yet another attempt to show off to the rest of the planet.

Beyond a small stage, many padded seats in minimalistic, black designs and some extra classroom-style chairs he'd arranged on said stage and installed his contraptions around, the room also contained a large clockwork model of this star system that would have turned a good bit over the heads of the audience, displaying Fabron with its four brethren planets, three gas-giants (on one which hosted the only other life in the system on one of its moon, a rich and colorful flora of fungal and primitive plant-like organisms, shores slick with bacterial biofilms in interesting colors) and one barren, rocky world that circled its sun in a tight orbit, and in the back of the room, a large telescope system containing several individual instruments that registered different kinds of input, such as one which could pick up roentgen radiation, which the designers and architects in charge of this room and its wall treated with the reverence you would give an organ in a church when incorporating its large pipes into the complete design of the room that comprised almost all of this building's topmost floor.

The seats, of course, were also practical to sit down for some light reading, and as in any museum there were facilities for both guests and guards to attend to their bare necessities.

Lower on the walls, where the spectators could actually be expected to be able to read them easily, a few sets of more mundane star charts revealed and documented how the Fabronians had once explored their entire galaxy; But the technology available to them at the time of this writing would only carry them to roughly two-thirds of their own spiral arms, where their ancestors had become myth as much as on the world that gave birth to them, before the numerous wars gradually steered their interests and energy away from further space travel.

Even in their glory days, their ancestors never acquired the means to actually _leave_ their galaxy, and neither did many of their other neighbors, before the arrival of outside visitors such as humans, Time Lords and (unfortunately) Daleks – The best anyone had been able to come up before that was the ability to cross between galaxies in Nevetina's local group; and all such civilations had become shrouded in myth by the time the humans came; Easy travel between various parts of the galaxy was already considered impressive. The neighboring Galaxy had given rise to a species known as the Aréal, that could reach Nevetina's spiral, and was, in fact, aware that the humans had not been the first visitors to their local group - In the age of the Fledgling Empires, at very least the Time Lords and the Eternals had visited and, in fact, contributed to the local energy beings – like the Aréal themselves - adopting a policy of using humanoid guises; The forms later natives and even later human colonists were met with were not meant to emulate them, nor the fully corporeal species the Aréal had evolved from, but the Gallifreyan explorers they'd first made contact with long before the oceans of Nevetina's planets spat out anything multicellular; The Areál world itself had been the oldest conventional life in its own Galaxy, with the only older – and similarly energy-based beings – having always existed in energy form and dating back to the processes of the early universe that had given rise to things resembling life without taking the detour to a planet.

(They, too, took Time Lord-like forms for the sake of communication, but the negotiations kind of broke down back in the day. To paraphrase, a humanoid representative of the continuum – which might be the appellation of their race, their society, or one particular individual using some kind of interface or avatar, they weren't exactly forthcoming about which one it was – showed up as a doppelganger of one particular Time Lord, and explained in perhaps more clumsy than truly haughty what they had done for the attempt of communicating with them and why they had done it.

The Time Lord, perhaps assuming that the continuum were better at communicating than they truly were, stopped listening at what loosely corresponded to “We were here first” or, “Although you are puny fleshy blobs, you don't seem half stupid” and responded with something that could only be accurately abbreviated as “Your Mom!”

The continuum probably didn't even _have_ a mother, but if they'd had one, they'd probably have valiantly defended her honor to the bitter end, so, the negotiations for any sort of alliance or cultural exchange fell through.

When the non-interference policy was established, the continuum decided to ignore them – and most other humanoids - right back, and both species found that they would most rather not involve themselves in the matters of the others, each thinking the other unprepared primitives – the ability to travel in time was unlikely to impress beings who could easily transcend it and weren't held up with matters of linearity, which the Doctor himself always found quite ironic – you'd think that not having to worry about out-of-sequence meetings would have made a partnership easier.

In any case, whether it was something to do with their different perspective on the universe, their personal opinion or just plain-old big-headed ignorance, the continuum did not think the Time Lords' abilities to travel all the way from the Milky Way in an instant to be particularly impressive, even though they themselves seemed to be unable or uninterested to extend their scope of influence beyond their home Galaxy.

If anything, the records suggested they might've been puzzled as to why anyone would find it worth bothering.

But come the Time War, and it would be left to him and his weary body (which, despite all of his insistence of working only for himself and for his goal of preventing and mitigating further harm, was still quite demonstrably Time Lord and thus likely to invite distrust) to convince both the Aréal and the continuum that the very corporeal Daleks were an actual threat to them, _and_ get them to work with various splintered human factions and diverse Nevetina Galaxy natives, not all of which could even breathe the same atmosphere – At least, the continuum's communication skills had somewhat improved, and he was met with two identical-looking representatives who introduced themselves as something akin to twin sisters, which he figured was a close enough equivalent, although not the metaphor he would have used – Maybe it was the last vestiges of his inner physics nerd, or the simple fact that his Time Lord senses allowed him a somewhat better glimpse at what they actually were, immediately, without delay or the need to glance at screens; He would probably have compared them to an electron/positron pair arising out of the vacuum. 'Sisters' implied parents, some origin in a smaller version of their current form, even meiosis –

He was also not quite sure if one of the 'sisters' was correctly described as a 'dissenter' rather than a manifestation of a different aspect of the same thing, but he honestly preferred dealing with that one – His perception of like-mindedness might have been truth, or, it might have resulted from him interpreting some of the things she said and did as alike to himself in a way that might have the other one going, 'Geez, Humanoids' (paraphrasing, of course), but in any case, he was fairly certain that she found taking corporeal form, or mimicking the properties of 'chemical life' as they called it, somewhat interesting and seemed to unexpectedly enjoy pouring booze into it, taking a liking to a yellowish concoction from one of the local planets.

While she was only so forthcoming with the information, she came off as somewhat eccentric, and she seemed more willing to learn and understand the corporeals' cause and why they might have a problem with the continuum's approach, nay, seemed actually interested in the universe at the matter level and even came to acknowledge that the continuum might have something to learn from them;

By the end of it, he could almost said that he felt a certain kinship with the ageless energy being and wished he'd met her at a different point in his life, when he could still have offered her to come with him for a while and just give him her perspective on the cosmos – a concept that she only seemed capable of understanding in a detached, intellectual manner. For her kind, the Time War was like a spot of thin ice on the surface of spacetime, a dangerous spot to be walked around and avoided. For him it had become a tar pit that was impossible to escape, and he was left having to secure the continuum's aid in saving the rest of their galactic neighborhood from that fate.

 

Even with his long history of diplomatic experience, he didn't think he could have pulled it off without a certain wide-faced colonist girl and her perspective on the Galaxy's inner political workings – she's said that while her ancestors hadn't evolved here, she considered the Nevetina Galaxy her home, the colony planet _her world-_

And that was a sentiment he could understand all too well, quite ironically –

Of course, by then, she'd put two and two together and deduced from his words and mentions here and there that he'd been to the – at this period in time – long lost home world of the human race (or Ravalox, as it had been known by then) and demanded to be told about it.

(Sweet, sweet Earth – The War had not allowed him to visit for a long, long time. )

In any case, he Time Lords then were most likely the first humanoid-like civilization to come up with advanced space-flight and visit other Galaxies. The closest to trans-galactic flight in Nevetina itself came not from the main Galaxy but an associated smaller one, sort of its counterpart to the Magellan clouds, by the scions of the long lost planet Lendara, and they had in turn encountered first the Aréal and then the Fabronians, assuring that the builders of this place had heard of the Milky way's existence in the form of legends at least, but that's all they knew of it, scholars all over the Nevetina Galaxy had frequently debated whether it was a real place, and even when the humans arrived as living proof of sorts, the connection between the place in the legend, and wherever these ingenious, fast-breeding new arrivals might have come from was rarely drawn.

It was too far away to be seen, even with the most powerful telescopes – but the Fabronians' telescopes had been powerful indeed, so they were at least _aware_ that there were civilizations in other Galaxies, having picked up the lights of their cities – the last few paragraphs of the charts and info posters were devoted to speculating about them, but even then, the authors of the text had probably never expected that the last ever person to actually read their poster would be one of those off-galaxy life forms.

 

All things considered, he'd found plenty of ways to amuse himself even in the very room he'd first landed on, but if he wanted to leave this institution, he'd have to walk through a few more floors' worth of museum, which he seldom managed without getting distracted amid paintings that had barely faded inside their preservative frames, artifacts of simpler forms of technology documenting the civilization's progress during distant times, and skeletons of long-gone animals about which knowledge had now also become lost – some were juxtaposed to animals that had still been extant at the time the museum had last been frequented, but has ceased to be by the current time period; The charts had been kept from even catching dust by dutiful cleaning robots that still made their rounds at a specific time in the evening when the museum had presumably closed it doors to the public.

Other exhibits would have told the attentive onlooker about the city's long history, garnishing artifacts from the various time periods with little plastic models of the city's perimeter and how it had expanded sideways, upwards and downwards over the course of it's long, long history.

As the Doctor took in the many texts and artifacts, he made mental notes of which places and time periods might be worth a visit, which legends and unusual accounts might be worth investigating and witnessing.

In that sense, it was probably rather fitting that he'd wound up here - He'd always felt at home in museums. As a child he'd been drawn in by the seemingly endless amount of fascinating objects and histories to go with them; Now, over 2000 years later, he still felt that wonder (on his better days, at least), but with the proud distinction that he'd already found out many of the world's secrets, and didn't need any charts or guides to know the secrets all those object held, in fact, he often knew better than many a professional expert, and some of the things might even bear the handprints of his interference (not here of course, at least not _yet_ ) – So when he walked through one of these collections _now_ , he felt a little like a nobleman proudly overlooking the splendor of his realm, or perhaps rather like the leader of a band of thieves overlooking his 'territory' – “All mine!”, in the lightest, least burdening, most freeing sense of the word.

The eclectic assortments of artifacts from throughout the ages might be the closest thing to his own existence that could be assembled in one room at one time, so the affinity he'd felt as a boy had only grown stronger. Who knows? He might indeed end up living in, and curating one in his last days – perhaps he might even succeed at getting Romana (who, one might imagine, would be an old lady by then) to say that one of his expositions trumped his brother's art collection.

But before that, he'd have to give this city's past a thorough visiting, and then come back to this place to 'keep score'.

He might just offer office-man to take him there If he ever _did_ go back to bring him his flowerpot; If he was happy to have the thing back, he could tell him to assist him as a sleuthing partner for compensation. From what his living quarters revealed, office-man didn't seem particularly adventurous, the Doctor doubted that he'd ever bothered to visit this museum. But office-man's meticulousness suggested that he might be attentive, and as such, useful. Or, he might as well turn out be complete rubbish.

Or not all that grateful for the return of his amateurish flowerpot in the first place.

He supposed that in that case, he'd have to go get someone who could be relied upon, some of his other friends and associates... He was fortunate enough to know quite a bunch of extraordinary people, but for most of them, it was a long, long time since he'd last seen them, and their next parting might always be more painful, or more permanent, than the last.

One way or another, the past of Fabron had quite a bit in store for them:

At first, the city began as a group of stilt houses along the shore of a lagoon, it's founders little more than simple fishers looking to feed themselves and their families; It was only with the advent of ships that the crossroad of rivers going in and out of the place led to the settlement gaining greater importance, and a name: 'Xalax' was derived from the word 'ksalat' in one of Fabron's ancient tongues, meaning 'salt', or depending on the time period, condiments in general (likely one of the most important goods to be traded here), so this was literally 'salt pillar city', quite fittingly, when you considered the sparkly white material that had been used for many of the uppermost spires.

As a trade hub, the settlement grew in influence and power, and over time, formed a ring around the body of water that radiated outward like sunbeams; Later, large gates were built at the entrances of the Rivers, and fortifications decorated the strip that once separated the lagoon from a long bygone sea. Had the lagoon been smaller, a ring-shaped city might have proven impractical, but in the case of Xalax, the circumstances were just right for something unique to be created, and transport per ship made communication between the various parts of the city easier; It was perhaps only a matter of time until the various small islands in the center of the lagoon were settled, first by the occasional lighthouse, then by newer, shinier buildings of stone instead of wood. By then, trade had become the citizen's main route of income, with craftsmanship being on the rise – after all, the artisans here were in a position to sell to much of the nearby land provided they were good enough, and the lure of prosperity lead the best and brightest of the region to swarm to the blossoming city state.

It wasn't long until the islands were completely covered in white stone, boulevards and streets ending right next to the sea, with increasingly resplendent and architecturally advanced bridges spanning the gaps between them, finding further ways to build further and further into the lagoon.

Over the course of a few centuries, a city of canals was created, the whole place, one single work of art, filling the lagoon until only a large ring of water, a sort of ginormous traffic circle for ships – remained uncovered. There were volumes of novels written about the bands of thieves that reportedly lived beneath the stilts of the city, hiding in houseboats at the lightness surface of the water. As the city grew, the bodies of water became more and more buried beneath, and integrated into, the lower levels of its architecture, every year faster as the inhabitant's blossoming technology allowed them to dominate their environments more and more, to divert and rectify sources of water, and, eventually, even pump it away from whee they didn't want it, and use it for factories, or even filtered as drinking water.

Ambitious noblemen had the infrastructure arranged in circular rings that were imitated by architects all over the continent, and later, the planet; Ready to boast of their city's riches, progress and their mastering of nature, they encouraged the lavish decoration of the buildings and supported the arts and sciences; Wealthy traders invested in the furthering of industry that allowed it's citizens to live comfortable lives. They admired their ancestors, so the city's concentric circles and white, stone-ike buildings were retained and imitated, but while it wasn't apparent, sophisticated materials replaced marble and sandstone bit by bit, and before long, there came a time where the globe of Fabron was no longer dark when its face turned away from its mother star; The glowing circles of cities lit up so brightly they could be seen from space, and its children learned to identify mega cities as yet another type of biome like deserts, oceans or forests.

On earth, Venice is famous for having but one single bit of greens, the park one Austrian empress famously got married in – Xalax, even in its iron age-like period, had none, not on the islands, anyways. And even back then, an Empire spread out from the watery ring of the city, and, with its conquests, spread order, unity, education and technology across the globe, something it would not have been able to do if it hadn't left easy ways for the people in the new territories to contribute and earn citizenship; and in turn, the influx of the planet's many cultures turned Xalax into a center of cosmopolitanism – it's origin as a trade city and a place of opportunity for everyone didn't completely preclude or expunge xenophobia, but it did put a damper of tendencies that could have torn the empire apart.

The city was populated by people from all the local tribes to begin with, it was born as a point of exchange between those – So having people from different continents coming there was little more than an extension of that.

'Xalaxian' was not an ethnicity; It was an idea, a set of values.

Before long, the Fabronians were planning to mark the moons of the outer planets with such circles; Literature depicts the moons as covered with one big city, hosting billions of Fabronians – but they grew proud.

War erupted, between the Empire of Xalax and two other large factions. Small countries were easily annexed, but a situation where those countries had to chose which empire to join, or fear to become a battleground between them, things looked different. The strong identification of the Xalaxians with their empire led to polarization, a strong us-or-them mentality, for if you were bound by a creed, and not blood, wasn't anyone choosing a different empire rejecting, nay, spitting on that creed that they had come to associate with civilization itself?

It was a was not even a war of ideologies, as the horrors of war drove the governments to the same extreme acts; But there was a tendency for the people to define themselves in opposition to the other factions, with members of the same ethnicities – of the same families even! - fighting on both sides, in patterns that were compared to the spread of conversion-based monotheist religions.

The actual religions, however, were also split among faction lines, with the practitioners often killing each other for the same gods – One side to protect a holy site in their faction's territory, another, to conquer it from their rivals.

With the world too small for them, and yet, all to themselves, the factions of Fabron acted like giants, breaking everything around them with their reckless stomps, and the wounds of hatred and resentment left by that conflict never fully healed – In those days, it was probably decided that Fabron would become a world whose very advanced inhabitants really hated each other, who would fight even when they met other factions in the vacuum of space, despite the many attempts of brave individuals to break the cycle, or escape the madness.

The colonies on the outer planets' moons remained, and kept fighting another on a smaller, not quite as dramatic scale, but Fabron itself was completely engulfed by the deluge of war, and nuclear bombs left their cities in dust and their empires sinking into the dirt.

Xalax itself was thoroughly desecrated by enemy troops, ransacked, pillaged and burned, an it is likely that large stretches of the architecture eventually collapsed into the lagoon when they were left in disrepair following the invasion, leading it to resemble a crater – But the common account that the inner structures were swallowed by the angry seas was most likely mythical.

The incident threw the planet back for centuries, but even then, people didn't abandon Xalax; Refugees kept living in the half-collapsed glory of their ancestors, scavenging, hiding from storms, suffering thirst while the poisoned water festered right before their eyes.

Slums nestled into the hollows of the ruins like molds, and many died in misery; Vines and weeds took back the urban area without anyone to stop them, and many locals tried to farm in the uncovered mud.

Xalax rotted. Fabron stagnated. Here and there, previously provincial regions became safe heavens where people enjoyed a somewhat better standard of living, but many of them rejected technology as something demonic and evil, refusing to accept that it was not the thinkers, but the fanatics who were to blame, perhaps because it was easier to see them as an 'other'.

Xalax' renaissance came not from within, but from above: While the planet was nowhere near rebuilding, the guerrilla-fights in the asteroid belts and ring systems had continued, until one faction stumbled upon the means to drive the others out of the system, and yet more; One hazardous experiment in one remote research facility would turn the tide with force: From the skies, they returned to the planet, and wiped away the ascetic settlements that, to their eyes, were blasphemous. They washed the perimeter of Xalax free of the rubble, and rebuilt the city in a form that, to their eyes, honored both the style and ethos of their ancestors, but also reflected the space-dwelling lifestyle of its new masters: It was the birth of Xalax' vast underground structures (and down there, the rivers supposedly still flowed, though they could no longer be seen at the surface, forced into aesthetic pathways and artificial waterfalls in the lower city)

The megapolis was envisioned as a completely independent, self-sufficient, if not downright space-worthy colony that rebuffed even the rain and sunlight as beneath it – the new circles of Xalax were contained beneath a large, domed structure, a large, black lentil-shaped object just marring the landscape with its absurd size and the far-flung glory it would earn.

It was in those days that the Fabronians' reach extended all over the galaxy, and the power their civilization had in those days was nothing short of legendary, the tales of their feats making it hard to discern where history ended and myth began. It is said that they shaped the world like gods and unraveled many of its final secrets – At least by the standard of this one galaxy they didn't leave, and their descendants that never surpassed them.

Tales of that era's glory were never complete without warning of that era's arrogance, the decadence and corruption their power led to, and the horrific wars the could fight once 'provoked'. Having witnessed the Time War, he didn't even _need_ his imagination to picture what they had been like – in fact, he had probably seen worse.

But whatever one might say about their society, the promises of their architects held up.

There was, amid the warfare, an incident that was known as Xalax' 'second sinking', but these words were an ironic echo at best – The complex did indeed become dislodged from the surrounding bedrock and sink a fair bit to where the ground of the lagoon had once been, but throughout that event, the entire complex remained intact – the corridors held, the power kept running.

It became buried under the molten rock, and when it had cooled, after they'd fearfully hidden in the complex for a long, long time (this, too, while writing or at least inspiring much poetry) their descendants had emerged and built the surface towers, including this one – The lower levels never went out of use until the city as a whole was evacuated much, much later, although legends of hidden mechanisms, tunnels or chambers – for example, the cavern were that goddess was supposed to be buried – abounded until the end, and indeed remained a popular subject long after the actual look and feel of the tunnels had become inaccessible to living memory, the art styles that depicted it afterward had gone through several styles that had probably less to do with the ancestors they both feared for the warnings of their foolishness and admired for their power and more with their own aesthetics and beliefs, indicative of what... would actually have been 'contemporary' to this period where the city had laid there abandoned, taunting any faraway passerby with the unfading whiteness of its immaculate spires.

Among all the untouched desolation, it was easy to forget that somewhere out there, beyond a certain perimeter, people still lived, time still passed, there was a fair chance that some of the paintings he'd seen a long time ago in the future were currently being painted as he stood there. Then again, everything could be 'current' if you only set up your telescope at the appropriate distance, and you didn't need a time machine to extrapolate and arrive at the conclusion that _nothing_ really was. Albert Einstein needed little more than paper and a few equations to dispel the illusion of simultaneity, which, incidentally, was rather different from his Fabronian counterparts – while humanity had predicted things like antimatter, time dilation and the higgs field on paper long before they had the capabilities to detect them, the Fabronians first encountered these phenomena when they caused pesky, unexpected errors with their, at the time, ever advancing technology – Satellite and probe orbits that didn't allow themselves to be calculated with full accuracy, orbital clocks that went slower than they should have, mysterious radiation from above interfering with their instruments, mostly surprise discoveries like the discovery of the microwave background radiation on Earth.

The famed Lady Roxas, who had the honor of coming up with an explanation and a mathematical framework to describe the phenomenon, thus making her name known to countless future generations of Fabronian Schoolchildren, was not a theoretical physicist, but an experienced inventor and engineer looking to circumnavigate its effect.

He'd come across various mentions of her, including a curt biography in a little aside to one of the informative little texts, but mostly learned about her from references in the books he's read, from simple mentions in pop-culture to her actual papers, of which there had been many, many more. From how she'd approached the oddities and handled the equations, she seemed like an industrious, straightforward person with a consequent, pragmatic approach to problem-solving, more interested in what knowledge would allow her to _do_ than any far-flung implications, and yet, not afraid to present and accept counter-intuitive conclusions if they were what the data suggested.

Her style, both in writing and equation-deriving, had certainly piqued his interest to an extent; She might be a more interesting figure to go and meet than the Trade Princes and Noblemen who ran this world into the ground and had their exploits and the duration of their reigns detailed in exquisite detail alongside the exhibits belonging to their time periods.

The heavy piles of jewelry that had been excavated from their tombs didn't do much to endear them to him.

 

At the back of the exposition hall, there was a wall lined with bones of the Fabronian's evolutionary ancestors, aligned chronologically as if to highlight the species' ascent to sapience, with a few educational texts on a few less successful cousin species.

The last skeleton in the row showed signs of heavy augmentation, holes drilled into the ribs, and in its skull, openings to accommodate for a number of implants, among them one he was able to recognize as a psionic enhancer or resonator, a device to boost an individual's psychic capabilities far beyond their natural levels. He'd seen the Master use one to broadcast his hypnotic powers on a planet-wide scale, and knew that his people had used significantly stronger ones in those early, more warlike days that gave rise to the Death Zone, one such artifact being the legendary Coronet of Rasslion that he'd had the personal misfortune of encountering, but even then they hadn't dared to wear one as a personal implant – Granted, the Time Lord's situation was a bit different than the Fabronians', for one thing, time travel and augmentation didn't really mesh well, as being struck with a technical defect far away from any compatible technology could easily mean death, and then, there was the matter of regeneration to contend with, the questions of how to perform extensive modifications without triggering one, assure that the new hardware wouldn't disrupt the process in case of an emergency – at the very least, those factors would likely create a preference for bioengineering over cybernetics as it had with the forefathers of the Time Lords.

But most of all, the types of mechanisms that allowed those internal enhancers to work would need to be wired directly into the brain and had a tendency to be notoriously volatile and dangerous to both the user and their surroundings, and it was highly unlikely that the creations of the Fabronian engineers had been any different.

The Device itself was on display in a glass box next to the skeleton, and one of the few technological objects in this compound to fully display sighs of advanced age, and with a brief assessment, the Doctor was able to conclude that it probably allowed for high-throughput long-range telekinesis, granting its user – most likely some kind of elite soldier, judging by this kind of hardware – the ability to level entire villages by himself, or worse, depending on the man's own innate level of ability. (and judging by his mostly intact pelvis and the abrasions on the bones, it _was_ a man, tall, long-limbed and accustomed to intense physical activity)

It was this technology that had allowed the colonists from the outer system's moons their reconquest of the entire system and the rebuilding of Xalax to what would become its 'big black dome' period, but that was a long, long time ago.

Both the implant and its owner were dated as having been dead for over fifteen centuries, hailing from what was labeled the 'second period of florescence' by the Fabronian historians – The person who wrote that sign would now be considered to have lived in the third – This was also one of the few places where the Fabronians of that time period had depicted themselves, if only for educational purposes – It was obvious enough from their clothing, their furniture and what he'd seen of their descendants that they must have been humanoid, but at the time the upper city's spires had been erected, they had a cultural taboo against depicted their own form, seeking to distance themselves from the excessively opulent art of their prideful ancestors who had already come close to leaving the planet in ruin several times.

However, educational purposes had been enough of a justification for a row of illustrations, the earliest of which depicted the primitive creatures the Fabronians had arisen from, all the way for simple, shrew-like ancestors to upright beings with flat faces. The first creature to have been depicted with a spear already bore a fully manifested, standard issue humanoid form, a somewhat less streamlined version of the space-age Fabronians – The skeleton next to it belonged to a young male hunter, who, according to the archeological findings about the time, would have been likely to have been wearing necklaces decorated with pierced animal teeth, light blue body paint, and a mottled loincloth and overcoat fashioned from the strung-together skins of many small mammals-like creatures.

Scraps of genetic evidence left inside the bones suggested luscious dark skin and a fluffy cloud of tightly-coiled dark hair. The illustration depicted him in a bit of a triumphant posture, but given that his early demise had likely occurred on the hunt, one might have surmised that the young man would have been better of if he'd lived in an era that did not require him to be sharp enough to deal with huge animals – the fractures on the ribs could be distinguished from post-mortem ones by the way they showed slight sighs of healing, but either infection or lung-related complications must have brought that to a halt despite his family's best efforts – microscopic evidence of plant material suggested that they'd treated the youth with herbs.

The family might have had further children and thought of this boy as one of those unlucky ones who didn't get the chance to achieve much or leave behind a legacy, but unbeknownst to them, something as simple as the composition of the soil that they chose to bury him in would assure that his remains would bear witness of the existence of their family for generations to come.

The next skeleton, between the hunter and the augmented warrior, was taken from a lavish child grave chock full of expensive offerings, food and spices and jewelry which the grave's occupant – a lithe girl on the verge of puberty – had likely never worn, even though the illustration, for want to anything else to show her in, did depict her as wearing them.

During that particular era, it was typical for the grave good to be newly-bought or crafted rather than things the deceased actually used and assigned a sentimental value to, particularly if the deceased was wealthy, and this girl had apparently been the only daughter of a rich merchant couple.

However, the paintings on the outside of tombs and markers would still often still _depict_ them with the things they had been buried with (which had the later Fabronian archeologists confused for quite a while), perhaps to allow the grieving families to visualize their loved ones chilling out in the afterlife endorsed by the local superstitions, so the way she was drawn here might have been fairly appropriate.

Having lost children of his own, the Doctor actually found himself feeling a connection to her parents – those long-dead merchants from a long-lost, bronze-age-level civilization.

The excessive amount of money they must have invested in financing the girl's unthrift burial might have seemed foolish or pompous to some, but he suspected that it was the parents' way to assuage the feelings of guilt that invariably accompanied any situation where you outlived your offspring.

It was probably less that those two were such firm believers, or that they wanted their daughter to brag of their wealth all over the next world, and more about convincing themselves that they could still atone or make it up to their child, or at least do penance and punish themselves through the sacrifice of their baubles.

Or maybe they couldn't, or wouldn't accept that she was really gone from this world, couldn't bring themselves to let go of her small body unless she was snugly tucked in and sufficiently provided with shinies, maybe they needed the comfortable illusion that they could still somehow care and provide for her to get on with their lives.

Of course, it was fully possible that this girl _really liked_ jewelry when she was alive, but that, too, contained an understated tragedy, for the concern to look pretty and possibly show off her material possessions to her peers was the sort of goal or dream a _young girl_ would have – Even if it stood to reason that she would have really appreciated her parent's gifts, they were the sort of gifts someone asked for when they had just outgrown toys.

If she had lived, if she had gotten a chance to grow into adulthood, her grave might have wound up containing items related to her profession, an artisan's tools, a merchant's weights and measuring rods, perhaps even an apothecary's vials or a scribe's brushes. Maybe she would have learned a musical instrument and taken it to the grave, or taking to hunting, which was a popular sport for the wealthy of her time. Maybe she would have taken a husband and been interred with his bones next to hers, or there might have been little tokens of affection from her children and grandchildren among the offerings, or even the traditional offerings reserved for honored elders; in that sense, the generic expensive gifts could be seen as a very literal manifestation of the parents' loss and helplessness, a distraction for the things the former owner of these bones might have become if they hadn't been consigned to decay in the midst of their maturation process;

 

And he did not lack the imagination, they did not lack the potential, for him to envision dozens of unlived futures for Adric or Jenny, the limitations they could have outgrown and overcome, the things they could have done, the differences, changes both massive and minute they could have left behind in the frameworks of the world – It was not _exactly_ the same with those older half-siblings of hers whom Jenny had so painfully reminded him of: Even before his fateful departure, he'd seen the eldest of them live longer than Clara could hope to have left the last time he'd visited her; He'd seen them graduate, take up professions, even starting families of their own, choosing paths unlike his own and he hadn't kept himself informed of their various going-ons for a long, long time – and even now, when there was a real chance that at least some of them still lived, or had been cheated out of their allotted time by something other than his own hands, the long shadow of the ultimate betrayal he'd at least _considered_ – however well-justified – might hang between them forever.

 

As such, he could well imagine that furnishing their daughter's grave had not really done these long-dead Fabronian merchants the closure or satisfaction they'd hoped for; That was a part of why he rarely stayed for the 'cleanup' stage of any misadventure. He knew what had been lost each time, no use to dwell on it, examine in detail what was painfully obvious.

In the end, he girl's remains had not even stayed in her fancy grave, its contents long since unearthed by some meddlesome archeologist, and, ultimately, carted off to this museum, where, as luck would have it, the last person to draw the girl's portrait was not the artist her parents had hired, but whichever illustrator made the educational drawings for this place – and they'd quite successfully given her the kind of stature her skeleton suggested, even featuring in the additional information minute signs of daily wear and tear added to the simple sizes and proportions of the individual bones.

The light, azure, sleeveless robes reaching just past her knees and the numerous glass beads in her hair or hanging off her as parts of miscellaneous jewelry were pretty much what the typical formal garb for a girl her age and station would have been in the time period in question, and since her skull shape suggested that she had indeed been a native of this continent, the saturated ebony skin tone she'd been depicted with was most likely accurate, but it must have been his own misplaced patriotism that led the artist to envision her as a native-born Xalaxian specifically, and according to much later second-florescence-era beauty ideals:

While the people descended from the tribes that had founded Xalax in the first place never had any special legal privileges, nor even a majority anywhere after the early stages of the imperial period, having such ancestry always carried a certain prestige, as the many diverse citizens of the empire all supposedly had its founders to thank for the creed they all followed, and most of the nobility belonged to that group.

The Founders of Xalax had been just one already mixed subsets of the tribes that lived in the area before it gained its later importance, but by the imperial period, the entire economy in the area was centered around trading with or providing for the capital, and by the time of the empire's first manned space missions, all of what had once been those tribes' territory had been subsumed into Xalax' urban sprawl.

Compared to the continent's other inhabitants, they were just as tall, but, on average a bit more slender, with somewhat narrower skulls and noses, their skins tending more toward ashen midnight-taupe than 'warmer', and more rufuous shades of brown – by human standards, the closest equivalent to their facial features might have been an Indian or middle-eastern person. Another trait fairly exclusive to these original tribes was a genetic variant that caused an individual's hair to be pure white or silver from birth. This wasn't even universal among the 'native' Xalaxians themselves – in truth, a good 60% of them sported the same shiny black as their (none too distantly related) neighbors, but the trait became associated with the group and its cultural connotations, and so, a beauty ideal was formed, which probably moved the artist to give this citizen of before-the-wars such pure white hair.

Beyond that, both the merchant's daughter and the stone-age hunter to her right was drawn with a few characteristic traits common to all Fabronians: That cluster of violet spots on their foreheads – a vestigial leftover of a temporary structure from their embryonic development – and their eyes, uniformly aquamarine irises that reflected incoming light like a cat's.

The illustration corresponding to the last skeleton in the row of exhibits – the cyborg soldier – was drawn with long, flowing silver hair – and given how advanced the technology had been back then, and that structures from that era still made up the lower levels of the city, this wasn't some frivolous flourish of later romanticism, but what the 'owner' of these bones was actually looked like on recordings of his person, or, at least, of others in his profession.

If he had that impractical hairstyle, then most likely because he was just _that_ skilled, precise and powerful and knew he could afford it; And judging by the impressive hardware they'd drilled into him, the man's haughtiness might even have been justified.

What's more, having been focused on assessing the man's augmentations himself, the Doctor only belatedly spotted a metal plate affixed to the plinth on which the heavily modified skeleton was displayed, the sort of obvious-yet-not-obvious thing that Rose or Donna would have noticed right away (Ouch.) , the letters on it slightly protruding, forming a text that detailed how this fellow had lived to the ripe old age of 275 while looking like he was barely hitting middle age, and wearing it with grace, too (a side effect of his ample catalog of augmentations), until not an enemy combatant, but some _other_ side effects from his modifications finally did him in, most of all – to little surprise for the Doctor – the various measures taken to enhance his psychic abilities way beyond what any single life form should be to possess, let alone safety use – beneath one the explanatory texts, there was a photograph of his autopsy record, challenging the very nerdiest of museum-goers to try and read the tiny print:

He had pushed his powers to the limit after having already exerted himself far beyond even _his_ considerable capacity earlier that day – his capabilities had reportedly been obscenely prodigious even before his augmentations came into play. Accordingly, he succeeded in whatever he was trying to do, but at the cost of burning out both his organic body and some of his hardware;

The coroners could not conclude what specifically killed him because there were far too many contenders – he was most certainly dead by the time an overheating implant cooked part of his much-abused brain, though a few ruptured blood vessels could have done him earlier, if they didn't just burst as a side effect of his losing consciousness atop some elevation, or possibly while levitating; The fall itself, though quite capable of ending your average baseline humanoid given enough bad luck, would be very unlikely to kill _him_ under normal circumstances, but it was another matter entirely when he was already weakened and a good amount of his mechanical components were somehow compromised, not to mention that the shock from his last feat could have knocked him straight unconscious.

Or perhaps, his death had even preceded the fall and was actually its cause – His innards could have simply shut down on him after a lifetime of risky augmentation, performance enhancing chemicals and the actual combat, including the backlash and energy drain from his unnaturally amplified psychic powers – he might not have looked, moved or even felt like it, but he _was_ an old man and though he'd kept both hard- and wetware upgraded, not all of it could be indefinitely easily swapped without repercussions; All the years and operations might have caught up with him when he pulled that crazy maneuver, and, indeed, so had the recklessness behind the lifestyle that his life choices indicated.

Even if he still lived after hitting the ground and the bleeding didn't kill him, his body may have simply come apart from the unnatural strain imposed on it, long before his skull had transformed into a pressure cooker; when they cut him open, the veteran psychic showed some major organ damage, regardless of whether the organs in question were artificial, vat-grown or the ones he was born with; There were some trances of undesired metabolic byproducts that should have been broken down, which may have dated back to damage from his earlier exertions or indicate that activity did not cease on the spot, it was hard to tell with the mess he'd turned himself into – Bones were shattered and muscles had torn, and, in places, flat-out liquified, the artificial ones nearly as ruined as the natural ones; His very cells had protested the energy output that was well beyond what any single organism should be able to effect, down to the microscopic levels, there were signs of breakdown, erosion and what might be mistaken for starvation if he hadn't been a psionic.

Even so, even after this whole superhuman, rasputinian ordeal, things might have gone differently if they had recovered him right away – Though it took them a while to get to him, Fabronian medicine in those days was so advanced that they actually succeeded in reviving and stabilizing his body.

Except, by then, they'd lost too much of his brain matter to the heat and all the other numerous complication that had arisen, far more than they could meaningfully replace in one go – The physical seat of his mind had disintegrated, and his mind may just have been the only piece of him that they couldn't replace.

Such a fate was not rare among the high-performance psychic warriors of his time –

According to the sign, few had ever withstood the strenuous procedures as long as this particular specimen had, but the lure of glory, power and patriotic propaganda assured that the military was never out of recruits, same as any other military ever.

This one seemed harsh even by military standards, though – Under the rationale that this fellow was 75% government property anyway, his 'blueprint' 90 % military secrets, and his status as one of the most efficient one-man killing machines created in his generation of experiments 100% invaluable, his remains were not returned to his family or buried according to the traditional rite at the time, but ended up in a lab, and later, this museum;

Unlike the other skeletons on display, his much-perforated bones had not been liberated from his flesh when it rotted away, but rather, it had systematically stripped from them, cut into orderly pieces and frozen for storage and further research.

Even in Death, the military got one last use out of his broken form: Before, it had been the common policy _not_ to equip personal implants of vital importance with an emergency shutdown, the rationale being that there was no point: Turning off the implant would certainly kill the person, whereas any malfunction contained by such a procedure _might_ do the same but didn't have to if they got help in time, and besides, there was hacking to worry about – After this case, in which a hardware overheat rendered a valuable asset unsalvageable, they found that they had a better chance of recovering and 'rebuilding' their operatives if they risked the emergency shutdown – or at least, they'd get a lot more valuable information out of dissecting a psychic's brain if it wasn't partially cooked;

What little had been left of this man's thinking organ after the devastating injuries and the futile revival efforts that had followed did not contain any significant information on what it was that made him a prodigy in terms of intelligence, combat _and_ psionic ability.

This, at least, had granted him the privilege of having his name and title recorded here: Not a standard-issue military rank, but something the TARDIS chose to render as Xanthos Helepolis – “Xanthos, Destroyer-of-Cities”, the original word rendered in a dead tongue ancestral to many of Fabron's language, something the people of Xanthos' time would have treated as reverently as humans treated ancient Greek or Latin, or as the people of the own world thought of Old High Gallifreyan.

Despite his usual policy in that regard, the Doctor made an effort to commit it to memory – After all, the man way dead, felled by the consequences of his actions, and even vainglorious butchers deserved a minimum of basic decency – at the very least, he could make sure to avoid dear old Xanthos, if he ever were to encounter him in the flesh.

Literally.

Literally in literal flesh... on his bones, that he'd encountered already.

Where was Clara when you happened to have a great pun for her to laugh at? Probably dawdling around with PE, that's where.

And unlike Xanthos here, PE couldn't even melt things with his brain.

Which was probably a good thing, all things considered, but at least the potential for vast destruction might have explained what exactly Clara saw in him.

Personally, the Doctor was still mystified by the very concept, but then again, Clara had always had her ways of keeping him mystified, and that was a big part of what he liked about her.

He just wished he would do that in ways that didn't leave him fearing that she might fall out of his world and become another finite colorful splotch in the long patchwork tapestry of his life – or not even that, he never tired of observing her in her little world and he'd never want to destroy it or wish restraints upon her – but at least, he preferred the prospect that she'd stay at his side for the foreseeable future, and allow him to delude himself into thinking that it would last forever, at least in the vivid, fast moments where it was not necessary to acknowledge the opposite.

He'd seen usually courageous people like Rose, Wilfred , Amy or Martha be daunted by the long and shadowed history that for him was merely his life, and not even one he was all that proud of, and he never really knew how to deal with that when it was him who felt honored to get to partake of the scarce and precious good that were their years, and wouldn't have invited them into a scenario where they had to stand each other every day and trust each other with their lives if he didn't seriously love spending time with them or feel that they would be interesting to get to know;

He supposed that it was, perhaps, his own lack of skill at expressing his appreciation, or one of the many little price tags on the life he'd chosen to live, but the reality was that he always needed them more than they needed him, and that they never needed him as much as they thought – If anything, he was the one who only got to partake in a tiny part of their lives, in which they'd be the dead center of his – and then they'd go on to be just as amazing elsewhere (ideally, that is, if no untimely tragedy prevented them), when the brief strip of both their illustrious roads that they'd walked together was long past.

When he happened to be feeling generous with himself, he might say that t made sense for awesome people to know and hang out with other awesome people.

Most of the time, he wasn't, and blamed himself for having made everything harder for everyone involved with all of his selfish meddling – But it was always a certainty that somewhere, somehow, the end would come, and this was never as apparent as it had been with Clara – From the beginning, she'd always had a world of her own, not as a promise in the future, but her private here and now. Proud of what she did before their paths crossed and already having found and chosen a path, she saw no reason to stop doing what she'd been doing so far, and pursued their joint ventures as a hobby on the side.

Never oblivious that he had a huge world outside of her, she refused to be outdone, to have nothing new to talk of when they met up for their joint ventures, to be the one friend who didn't have anything planned on weekends. Neither was she easily impressed or reverent, ready to soak up useful skills and worthwhile experiences for sure, capable to let herself be but never even considering deferring as a default response, nor ever shy to put him in his place, or the one she had assigned him, so he didn't know what made him have illusions, except perhaps her career as his lifelong shadow, to her, long since over, to him, still partially to come, at the time, a pragmatic solution to a problem that had interfered with his being so deeply that it was impossible to stay wholly dispassionate about.

Either way, whichever system of reasoning or feeling he used, the bottom line was that he owed her gratitude and couldn't possibly ask any more concessions of her.

He'd set her free so she wouldn't be held down by her attachment to him, but now, he could hardly stand to see her actually believe, actually act as if it had all been a misunderstanding and go find someone who was free to reciprocate.

He'd left her out of this particular endeavor because he expected it to be time-consuming, but now, suddenly, without warning, he found himself acutely wishing she were here, burning to know what she might think of this lost empire, bursting with words and hopefully witty ways to describe to her the circumstances of the place's abandonment.

He stops his avalanche of thought with the thought of her asking if Xalax was ever recolonized.

It wasn't.

 

– and the 'Third Apocalypse' that entailed the abandoning of Xalax would not even be the last catastrophe to engulf the Fabronian civilization. It was the Fourth that finally rendered large stretches of the planet uninhabitable for good, forcing the last remainders of the population to find refuge in domed cities.

There were other settlements beside those, built upon the rubble of broken, once glorious civilizations, but they crumbled over time. Only the domes provided sufficient shielding from the poisoned atmosphere and the radiation; Only completely artificial, enclosed environments could produce food in these blasted lands, but the decline of Fabron's culture, civilization and people could only be slowed, no longer stopped.

The gene pool was too truncated, the survivors' genomes too shot through with radiation; The birth rates steadily declined, infertility, stillbirths, inborn disorders and hideous malformations were commonplace, technology and knowledge remained lost and buried in the sands,

It was in that state that he found this world on his first visit, and incidentally, how the human colonists found it when they reached the Galaxy.

At that time, some of the last Fabronian youth traded their barren and devastated world for the stars and scattered among the human empires, some forming small colonies or earning great renown, but their home world would never sing songs of revival.

In those days, even the small rodents littering the surface area now had dissapeared, leaving the humanoid Fabronians and their world's answer to sulfur bacteria as the only survivors. The once cultivated landscape, the lush gardens and fertile terrains had all transformed into deserts of yellowed, scorched earth and rust-like dust, with an acidic yellow haze floating in the sky in place of clouds, low and heavy like storm clouds about to burst open and release their contents.

It was the heat and fire of that last war that had finally made Xalax a ruin, broke open the dams and let the seawater flood back into part of the city area.

By the time he came here, much of it was already buried in sediment and the abandoned remains of a brief, later settlement that never got to thrive, ripped-open houses resting amid bent power line masts and half-submersed, headless copper statues decaying in the rusty-red water and salty white sand, the one or two story buildings not even worth mentioning amidst the half-melted remains of the surface spires.

Below, it was thought that the ellipsoid structure of the lower city was thought to be still largely intact, but buried forever.

The place had become known under the name “World's End”, and become a monument to the folly and pride of this civilization – Parts of the white-red beach and large stretches of the adjacent hills had been covered in grave markers, diverse marble creations crafted with a certain individuality to them casting many shadows along the shore, here and there, tall, stark black columns would stick out among them; The bloody-red waves lapped on a bone-white shore crowded with grave stones.

His first thought upon seeing it was that it was aptly named for how a young child might imagine the end of the world, all space taken up by graves until there was nowhere left to bury people, no place left for living people, and no people left to bury – in truth, the site only continued for a few city block's worth of surface area, but the sight was still enough to leave an impression, even on him – back then, he still thought his own civilization had gone the way of the Fabronians, destroyed by one of their own, their splendor left to corrosion and decay by their pride, and the sight matched his mood – He'd come here on his own, in the days after losing Donna, perhaps in search for a place where he could ooze gloom without pulling anyone into his personal tarpit, or perhaps as an infantile, counterproductive sort of self-punishment that now merely embarrassed him. He thinks it was quite soon after Mars – He'd met this person he admired, because of her drive to colonize a new world, perhaps even feeling an affinity because of their similar childhood experiences, their common drive not to catch a once terrifying thing, but to follow and understand that glimpse of the world's deepest mysteries – And he'd driven her to end herself deprived her of her rightful heroic death, yet another inexcusable taint on his hands, and, when he came to Fabron – the taste of the air immediately reminded him of his visits to Skaro and the horrid creatures that had coalesced from its battlefields, and maybe that was what made him repeat that same mistake for old time's sake, namely, tasting it at all –

After not leaving their domes without hazard suits for ages, there were some areas of Fabron that, by the era of the human empire reaching the Nevetina galaxy, the immediate effects of the Fourth Apocalypse had subsided to the extent that some places could be visited without such precautions as long as the exposures were kept short and infrequent, with the few remaining Frabronians having grown somewhat more resitant than humans.

The former city area of “World's End” was _not_ recommended as a place to go suit-free, but he judged from the readings that _he_ should be able to hold out a good while.

But he was so captivated by the dreadful sights and their resonance with the oily black mood that had possession of him at the time, so powerless to break free from his ruminations of his own numerous awful deeds and his growing conviction that a place like this was exactly where he belonged, that he lost track of the hours in the empty expanse, and by the time he returned to the TARDIS that day, he had to wipe some of his own blood of his lips, an ironic little preview of the fate that awaited him later that year, and well enough to remind him just how miserably he'd been coping with his self-imposed isolation (Rose would probably have sensed his foul thoughts and found the words to defuse them, or at least, refused to leave his side so he'd have made a timely retreat for her sake at least; Donna would have had none of it and shot down any talk of him remaining out there by himself from the get-go, while Martha might've trusted him to mind himself, but insisted on hard numbers, and have been liable to put herself in danger to drag his sorry backside back to the TARDIS when he didn't show up in time, and he'd have owed her his life once again)

Useless over dramatic moping indicative of butt-hurt pride, he thinks, these days. Atonement would have been better served by accepting what he is and doing something productive. Or so he'd thought for many, many years; Concercing the question of 'what he was', the waters had been muddied all over again since he'd encountered Clara.

Perhaps, he thought, as he strode past the last few exhibits without more than a superficial glance to make his way back to the TARDIS, his prideful moping days weren't quite over yet.

 

The blue box, at least, is a familiar comfort of sorts, as far as such concepts apply to him.

He lets his hands rest for a moment, on its imitation of wooden doors, before pushing them inwards, not to depart, but to grab some more equipment.

 

 


	6. Day 6

Day 6

 

By the next morning he'd done what he should have done long ago and acquired some basic proficiency in the most widespread Fabronian dialects – the thing with learning Languages is that once you'd passed a certain level of basic skill, you could deduce the bits missing from your vocabulary from context – especially I the bunch of languages you were studying were related. Especially when one had extensive experience with the process and even more so when you had enough experiences with similar types of grammar to risk some lucky guesses – there were, after all, only so much ways to combine sounds into useful messages.

 

He'd sat in one of the planetarium's comfy chairs for quite a while, further supported by a couple of small pillows he's snatched from some corner of the TARDIS library. His first choice for practice reading were his personal favorites among the Fabronian Literature he'd sampled to far, sprinkled with a few generally influential works that had his curious about their exact wordings, granted, the TARDIS typically translated everything with a good mixture of idiomatic suitability, precise detail and appropriate conservation of spunk, but there was a certain charme to seeing the exact words the authors had chosen and perhaps spent time wondering and deciding about, what their thoughts had sounded like in their long buried heads.

After searching for a few passages that interested him in terms of what the original word choice might have been, he took the time to scribble few reference sheets for the less common or somewhat archaic alphabets of the Planet, just to have them on hand in case he encountered any further writing while exploring the city – as much as he could rely on the TARDIS to translate anything that went beyond his own capabilities, he kind of liked the challenge of deciphering it himself, something he'd rarely have the time for when he had company to entertain; Usually, he'd save pursuits like this for the nighttime trips, these days, they were getting done when Clara was tied up with work of her own.

He could imagine that she wouldn't have found this all too thrilling anyways, especially not after he'd ended up walking around in a dusty abandoned city looking for old inscriptions to make sense of – that was almost... well, an archeologist's work.

Although he didn't like to admit it, his pursuit of linguistics as a hobby had meshed pretty well with River's chosen occupation and even saved their butts that one time he accidentally activated some ancient civilization's teleporter and landed them light years away from the TARDIS, but those days were long gone now.

As he assembled his things, he briefly wondered why he'd never taken her here while he had the chance – this kind of venture would have been right up her alleyway. She might've taken up archeology to track him down and make sense of the contradictory things both the silence and her parents had told her about his person, to go looking for her own version of the truth between the pages of dusty books, but what she'd found was much more than that – He sure liked the thought of her nursing a growing fondness as she thumbed through the pages of his accomplishments, but what really made him proud was that all the stories of civilizations, societies and their notable members must have captivated her heart somehow, or else, she wouldn't have gone back to continue her academic career.

Why she chose to do her exploration of those bygone cultures by examining their dusty remains when she easily had the possibility to personally take a look at them at their peak, he would never understand, but in hindsight, that she'd cheekily defend her work from even his playful jabs showed how far she'd come in creating something for herself in defiance of the destiny the silence had attempted to force on her.

So, it stands to reason that she'd have had a field day with these abandoned corridors; He could imagine that she probably would have provided him with a further list of items to bring before giving himself over to his wanderings, most of which he'd have scoffed at, but her suggestions did have that annoying habit of coming in very handy later on.

Maybe this place had just never occurred to him as a potential destination, after all, the universe was big and there was no shortage of elaborate underground complexes and ruined cities in it. You wait next to any city long enough, and there's a good chance that it might eventually wind up ruined.

Or maybe it was because he recalled this place _too_ well did not want to touch upon the memories of the Time War, or the miserable time in his life that had prompted his second visit. River was an astute one, too. She'd notice if he was hiding something; Sure, he could claim that it was something to do with her personal future (“spoilers!”) and count on her younger versions being too careless to ponder what that meant, the older ones sufficiently mature not to probe it any further, but by the time she arrived at the library, she'd sort through her diary pages and find her reminiscence soured by the unmistakeable stench of a broken promise, and she deserved better than that.

He'd done her, and those who had come before her a great injustice anyways, in assuming that they'd be irrevocably repulsed if they could only see what he'd locked away; But when he couldn't prevent Clara from seeing, she didn't turn and run – She'd stuck it out by his side and gently supported, nay, even inspired him on his darkest day, and that's why he had been keen not to repeat the mistakes he'd made in the past. Aside from the first few encounters from “her” side in which she had been young and reckless, River had always seemed mature and collected, juggling her many secrets with governed pragmatism when playful banter failed her, and this perception he had of her as an experienced, seasoned traveler much like himself, someone who teasingly dangled secrets just above his head and refused to be seen through, this someone who always existed at a distance, might have been a part of why he'd been less reluctant to openly display desire toward her more than he usually did – but all the while he was also painfully learning how much of her attitude was born from simple necessity to keep the timelines preserved and harsh lessons learned from the colossal mistakes of her youth.

It wasn't until the end that he realized how much of her strength was owned to her nerves of steel, a deliberately produced mask she'd upheld for the sakes of him and her parents – although he would have come at her call whenever she'd have asked, the energy he'd been expending to uphold his own wall of denial was something she'd read as a clear sign that he didn't want to be bothered with the reality of her own problems, not when he could barely face his own, and in they end, they had never been able to stand the repercussions of each other's company for extended periods of time, thanks to his own immaturity and the way it had exacerbated the already dismal cards they'd been dealt.

And things with Clara might easily have gone down a similar route, their precious eyeblink of time wasted with suspicions brought on by out-of-sequence meeting, but be it through some quality of Clara's, the bitter lessons of experience, or simple probability making such a double pileup of tragic circumstances too unlikely even for him, meaning that it was time for him to catch one of the few breaks allotted to him, but she'd managed to break through to him despite all odds and become his confidante, and that's why it had been important to him to approach her, or the world in general with... not necessarily more truthfulness, but certainly less filters.

Old habits die hard, however, and sometimes deceptions were necessary to save their lives, or simply all too tempting; In the end, a person could only overhaul themselves so much, especially after such a long time of being very set in his ways. People didn't change overnight, not even if they were Time Lords – Humans might get the impression that they were rather versatile from their ability to remake their bodies, but in truth, he was probably in the best position to know what a stubborn lot his people really were, and he was not as much of an exception as he sometimes liked to think.

After all, he didn't have her with him right now, nor did he inform her about the particular significance of where he was going, feeding her only a name that wouldn't mean anything to her when she'd explicitly asked as he was about to disappear back into his trusted blue box, and by the end of what unbeknownst to him was the end of his first week here, it was beginning to dawn on him that his reason for coming here alone was not really related to not wanting to bore her.

 

All this, complete with the practice reading, a brief walk to find random writings to decipher (he had a hell of a time with an instruction manual that was written in various Fabronian languages) and the various musings that followed ate up roughly a night and the following morning, or so he'd guessed; He hadn't really bothered with looking outside for days, the city's internal structures stretching out endlessly and packed full with potential distraction to tempt his curiosity.

As a corollary, it had eventually occurred to him that many of the Xalaxians probaby hadn't seen their world's mother star all that often, either. In a human settlement, this would have made the upper spires the abode of the rich and left the lower levels for those who couldn't pay for sunlight, and who, depending on the wealth, advancement and government quality of the place, might or might not have become neglected, but in Xalax and many other Fabronian cities inspired by example, this was not the case: Due to a number of societal reasons, like the lower city's long history, the sensibilities of the space faring colonists who rebuilt if after living in space stations and biodoes for a long time, and the Fabronians' somewhat different attitude toward technology and how to approach safety questions (it was not correct to say that they were more naïve, as their trust in technological methodology extended to how new advancements were to be tested; Being less skeptical than the average human could be an advantage as well, and it wasn't as if humans had never been reckless; But given that they had managed to thrive while the Fabronians had destroyed themselves in a blaze, homo sapiens must have done something right, or something wrong that just happened to limit them just as much when it came to blowing themselves up, or perhaps they'd just gotten lucky, and their fates could easily have been switched around, given that the Fabronians were once explorers, too. In any case, the humans that came to see the Nevetina galaxy found the graveyards of world's end to be a thought-provoking cautionary tale. ), made the lower city and its lush gardens sustained below layers of barren rock the most prestigious and coveted place to live – on the surface, the basic and universal biped fascination with things that were taller than others, perhaps inspired by the young's frustration at not being able to reach the fruit trees (slash tall shelves where the adults kept the candy), had then taken over and assured that the tops of the spires were given to flashy public buildings meant to show off to the neighbors - capitalism on the other hand consigned much of the levels immediately on the surface and therefore closest to the boulevards to shops and businesses, while the middle of the towers often housed living complexes for simple employees or service personnel, like the one-bedroom apartment he'd “borrowed” earlier.

The poor in Xalax had not been many, but the authorities had not wanted them in plain sight, so that they'd been given their housing in the vicinity of larger bits of machinery, where the ambient noise from water treatment plants or ventilation shafts made the more affluent people unlikely to buy anything, or near the outer walls, either in the medium tunnels or precarious tunnels added to the outermost reaches of the outer city where they extended into nearby natural cave systems outside the main dome, where they would obviously be without protection if some explosive event were to displace the whole structure once again, but to the Xalaxian's credit there were regularly practiced evacuation protocols that had ultimately never been needed.

As with humans living in very high latitudes, or even susceptible to plunging into sustained polar night, some individuals might require some pretty good imitations of sunlight to stave off adverse effects (the natural climate around Xalax was comparable to the shores of the Mediterranean), but to the engineers, architects, city planners and healthcare providers, this was just another requirement among many to master and manage.

As for the Doctor himself, he'd spent so much time living either in frosty Trenzalore or the endless, fully automated corridors of his own spaceship to really find anything extraordinary about the lack of natural light. The internal maze of the TARDIS was in many ways more advanced in its offerings and comforts than the Fabronian cities, even if it typically only housed a crew of one to four people.

Xalax, at its last true height, held billions, and it's inhabitants didn't even have access to dimensional engineering or phase-shift technology – and those observations and comparisons, it occurred to him, might've been quite the adequate tool or opportunity to give someone a vague sense of what Gallifreyan cities had been like – At first glance, the planet might've looked sparsely populated, much of its icy mountains, silver forests and rocky plains looking untouched or rural to the untrained eye, the occasional band of hermits, monks and deviationists roaming across the harsh and unforgiving terrain its resilient inhabitants had evolved in (as its landmass was greater then earth's, so were the areas dominated by central-continental climates, and owing to the planet's larger size, the gravity was a fraction stronger.), most major institutions centralized in one of its few yet well-fortified cities – but this was a civilization so advanced its technology could be subtle, elegantly concealed until needed and so astonishing in its potency that it might look like magic to visitors, had those ever been particularly welcome, and as for those cities, there was no straightforward two-dimensional map that could have captured its impossible twists, turns and impossible figures.

No need for new structures when you could just enlarge the old ones and still keep the exterior aesthetics of your venerable forebearers – that would usually still be around to boss you around and complain about your architecture, anyways. The billions of Gallifrey were never all too noisy and, on average, content with their confines in a way humans would rarely ever have been; They never got tired filling up space with new things for the heck of it.

Perhaps the occasional youth, not fully processed by the system or one of those incompatible little flukes that were a side-effect of evolution, might've made the occasional bits of noise, but there wasn't much incentive to listen to them on a world where those in power had occasionally held their offices for longer than humans had had written language by Clara's time and could answer each half-formed thought or idea with a well-practiced chastisement. The commonly portrayed idea was that getting into any position to change anything required a lot of discipline and patience – something he now knew to not be strictly speaking true, given the times he'd gotten the presidency dumped in his lap, or how Romana had seized it at an age when he was but an obscure little researcher living in his illustrious family's shadow (Though he wouldn't have taken her job for the world, he can't say that he didn't envy her just a bit. It would be at least partially correct, albeit grossly incomplete to say that she'd had his help, but he'd needed quite a bit longer to figure out what to do with himself. )

But generally speaking, childhood and youth were but the blink of an eye in the overall existence of the typical Time Lord, and so the brief state of being a 'newcomer' to the world wasn't given much emphasis or attention, to the contrary, it was expected that the youth get themselves disciplined, educated and ordered into the system as soon as such a thing was practicable, and letting kids be kids, or youth be youths, was an unfortunate side-effect at best.

He liked to think that he rebelled and stuck out from the very beginning, but once put in a different context, he couldn't deny that he'd done his share of absorbing and adapting to be able to live in a place that he had not been able to leave for over four hundred years; For a human, their formative years would take up a fourth of their existences; They didn't have non-complicated sounding words to distinguish between the objectively quite different processes of maturation and accumulated decay, having seen them as a continuum until they got themselves microscopes.

(The Fabronians, he supposed, could have been regarded as being somewhere in-between. Like Time Lords, they'd be regarded as being still somewhat green behind the eyes until they'd seen at least their first century, but they'd have long since finished their education by then, and with some variation depending on the time period, that might be a good third of what they would live. )

Childishness was underrated, that was basically one of the … tenets of what he was saying.

But everything in moderation, as they say.

Including moderation.

 

There's another thing he turned out to be mistaken about: The museum illustration on the floor below doesn't end up being the last painting to ever be drawn of the little merchant girl whose remains he'd seen exhibited down there;

After more than enough time clicking and swiping through books, he's somewhat better informed but also itchy for movement; The first thing he does is go back down to look up what “Xanthos Helepolis” equates to in its native language; It's a more complicated cultural reference that he now understands; The name hails back to ancient history, something an ambitious scientist might've thrust upon his finest creation, or maybe Xanthos, contrary to the Doctor's initial impression from his career summary, might've been feeling a bit self-ironic: The title, as the counterpart the TARDIS had chosen, was taken not from a legendary hero, religious figure or philosophic concept, but from a legendary siege weapon – While the terrestial version was basically an ancient greek Death Star, a superweapon foiled by an obvious weakness, the Fabronian “Helepolis” fared a lot better and came to cause quite a bit of terror and sorrow before meeting its undoing, quite like Helepolis-the-man, but it didn't stand to question that whoever had chosen the epithet (the uninformed, propaganda-gorged public being another option) had named him for an _object,_ a weapon no less.

He supposed that it made sense by military logic, after what he'd seen, but still, he'd never get how they could sometimes be so... obvious, scream out what he might suspect they were secretly thinking, but should have been to shameful to say out loud.

For all they disgusted him, he couldn't really fault the Daleks for screeching out their diabolical intentions; Their creator had left them no other option. But most citizens of the universe had an option, secondary pieces of software added to the primitive reptilian drives, and still, now and then, chose not to use them – and he was one of them.

Then, mentally grasping at any welcome distraction, he recalls one of the texts he read, some essay about what passed for watercolors on Fabron, or at least a rough equivalent, and a mental note he'd made to try out that technique so far, and possessed by a sudden impulse he decides to put in a stop for what is essentially the work of processing.

He does diaries, scribbles notes, vents his impressions on the lost city, sketches its spires into his journals with a remarkable amount of atmosphere and impression captured in surprisingly crude arrays of lines, the right stroke of detail here and there, or the reflections of the light as he depicted them doing the trick to make the observer's brain add all the other work.

At some point, he got his materials and decided to do some painting, leaving colorful stains on floors that would probably never be walked on again once he packed all this up and left this place for good.

He doesn't quite know how the rudimentary outlines on the sketch wind up becoming the merchant girl, but they do; It might be because his glance briefly brushed over her portrait when aiming for Xanthos' name plaque, and tugged on the network of associations he'd built around the sight.

He's got half a mind to make this the 'historically accurate' edition, starting with her hair color and a different set of jewelry, but if he went down that road, some stubbornly competitive part of his might lead him to jump in the TARDIS, leaving his strewn-about instruments and papers just where they were, and sketch the girl as she'd really been when she had flesh on her bones; There was nothing limiting his capacity of finding that out, but that was not really something he wanted to do to himself.

Had he gone to her era first, and never seen this museum, another minimally different skeleton from the same period, even the same cluster of graves, could have easily taken her place without mattering much to the fates of the researchers who'd excavate the bones and the museum visitors who might have been inspired or warningly admonished by this window into history but now that he'd seen this place, interweaved it with his thoughts and even motivations, she was part of his causal nexus, and he was no longer sure whether anything in his power that could have shifted her fate.

Instead, he draws her much as she appears on the illustration he'd previously seen, white hair included, except that at some point, he started sharpening the edges of her face, tweaking the shape of her eyebrow to make her gaze appear firmer, swapping the jewelry for slightly more distinguished choices, intricate red garnet stones hanging from her ears and neck, a common traditional gift for a daughter that was ready to leave the house, as he'd learned from a few novels set in that period and the occasional blemished artifact of such items in the museum.

Even making her a young adult would only give this potential, imagined version of her a fraction of what she could have had, but it was a futile exercise he was willing to waste his time on; If nothing else, it was cathartic in a fashion that was indirect enough.

After that, he proceeded to capture some more impressions in full color, scenes from books, events described in this museum; Maybe one day he'd go to see them for himself and get to compare the products of his imagination (and those of subsequent Fabronian painters) with the real thing, or perhaps come back here and wander into other, subtly different versions of this reality in the wibbly-wobbly cavern of possibility that was the universe.

He's had more than enough inspiration to picture all the past and future occasion of this city breaking apart in glorious, dramatic detail; Though he would not be completely flabbergasted if he encountered something all new (that, too, was a part of knowing this universe) it was hardly probable that nothing of what had occurred, what it had looked like, wouldn't resemble anything in any other city he'd seen destroyed, not after he'd seen Arcadia cracked open; It was more a question of which of several likely scenarios had actually taken place; He'd need a closer look at the stilts and fundaments of pre-dome Xalax to know for certain wether it's circular shields and rings broke into segments when they were swallowed by the waters of the lagoon, so for now he judged by whatever would improve the painting's composition.

He felt like wild brush strokes today, intersected with baroque plays of shadow, movement and complicated body postures, the garish, almost pictogram-esque depiction of smoke and fire contrasting with the wind-whipped white robe of a lone figure trying to stay on their feet; He gave more detail to individual little things or the scattered, horrified citizens than to the larger components of the catastrophe, the flooding waters themselves were well-placed nuances of color and little else; By its side, the image of a youth who was trying to climb out of the rubble had been given particular attention, and endowed with as much lifelike detail as her small fraction of the canvas allowed, down to the dust specks on her scraped skin and the frayed ends on her tunic, a not inelegant, but simple garment that, together with the basket she was carrying on her back and the lack of extravagant jewelry beyond simple red glass bead earrings, a metal ring around her right arm and a heavy barrette of yellow metal and blue stones that held her thick black hair in place, marked her as a simple laborer or vendor; The small boy next to her was dressed to indicate a similar status, possibly her little brother, cousin or unplanned-for son, or possibly just someone she was babysitting; The Doctor hadn't really decided, but he spontaneously decreed that the girl's barrette would be a family heirloom, and went to apply some light, curved lines to suggest an engraved pattern.

Whenever he found that he had nothing more to add to given painting, he'd methodically put it aside, (perhaps for later revision) and continue with the next canvas, brushes and fingers in hectic motion that seemed almost self-sustained.

And he was so focused on the technique and detail – a rosette of elaborate clothing folds here, a gradient of colors tinted with the flickering light of a campfire there, some bundles of straw in the background – that he only belatedly reached full awareness of the whole his whims had created, something that only peripherally related to this time and this place, that wasn't an accurate depiction of anything _else_ either – as that would have required planning – but he knew where its individual elements had come from, why it was a small rural festival setting without the exact look of everything being preserved in more than a paraphrased way, a campfire for a campfire, a grill for a grill, not necessarily the exact type from back then, not that he even remembered – but he would never forget the short individual in the long red dress dancing along with the other village girls.

The swirl of long brown hair seen from the back was merely a pointed allusion, but her face, had he chosen to draw it, wouldn't have been something he'd have to haphazardly reconstruct from hazy memories; Whatever wrenches the future might throw, at his relative present, he saw that same face with as much semblance to regularity as he could probably stand.

Funny how beyond the city's abandoned towers and the plains that surrounded them, outside his stretch of neutral zone, there were people living their lives without knowing that they, and this whole huge galaxy, probably owed its existence to the intervention of a single girl from a faraway world who might not ever remember very much of it; He could have taken here to some of the places they'd visited, and she might not have felt more than a vague sense of Déjà-vu; The colonist village itself might have evoked a stronger reaction, but since it had been implicated in the Time War and hadn't been populated for all that long before its fiery end, it was forever inaccessible to him. But that specific chain of events and the now devastated region were a fairly small splotch of temporal scar tissue compared to the galaxy's full expanse of lives, cultures and stories, and the endless destruction, rewrites and anomalies a prolonged escalation of battle between Daleks and Time Lords would have subjected it to; And he didn't think he could have prevented it alone.

Then again, he couldn't have stopped the reality bomb or the time cracks without the deeds of Donna and Rory, respectively, and there were many citizens of the universe who didn't know of them, either – In the end, the memory, or its imperfect, endlessly ruminated and reinterpreted remainder, would always stay with him as something he'd carry with him for as long as he could, and that was so common a reality in his life that he'd long since stopped analyzing it to bits and moved on to just trying to live with it.

It's not like he _wanted_ Clara to remember her demises, all the times the Daleks got to her first, or what she might've glimpsed of the days yet to come for him, but there was a certain feeling of loneliness about being the only one to know one half of the story, or at least, the parts of it he'd since recognized for what they were. He might never know how much of the last few millenia's worth of lucky coincidences was actually her doing, and he might never stop wondering.

The full story might never be known to anyone, as it was with most if not all stories when one really thought about it.

Given how everything had turned out, it might be for the better that she didn't recall certain things that had transpired on the lucky occasion of him finally putting the pieces together –

(“Who told you that?” “I think you just did.”)

At this point, he wasn't going to go all sentimental and go with a phrase such “but as long as I remember” as it was, to his liking, a tad to cheesy, self-centered and just and invitation to this mischievous universe to strike him with amnesia – the people who looked up to him as a hero and a symbol for the valuing of all things might expect him to remember everything, everyone, but a long, long time after demon's run and that one valiant defector from the gamma forest, he'd come a few steps closer to accepting that he was a limited being which sometimes had to prioritize, not in value but pragmatic usefulness; Not that this necessarily meant that he didn't find the things in question _worth_ remembering, though some obviously annoyed him.

But his continued existence, he's immediate affecting of, and interacting with further thing and people – _this_ was proof of what she'd done.

By the very merit that he was here, and that this place was still here, it couldn't be as if it never happened.

He didn't know if it was night outside these walls right now, if all the little dots of light of the Nevetina-Galaxy were aligned, many of them shining over cities just as illustrious as this one, but one of the lights that would have gone out over Trenzalore's skies if the Great Intelligence's interference had been left unchecked was most definitely this Galaxy, condensed to a single dot by vast stretches of distance.

 

He'd had a long, long time to stare up at Trenzalore's particular arrangement of stars with wistful longing for what he thought were glory days that would never come again, and perhaps a sense of resigned contentment over a job done to the best of his abilities, assigning names, shapes and associations to constellations the original colonists hadn't even bothered to name because they held little of any absolute or fixed nature to the settlers before the town had come under siege – People who could build a cheesily-themed town in space knew just how different those stars could look from any other angle, but when the people became trapped there and were faced with the harsh truth that this might be true for their future generations, they were in need of a mythology, and his endless fount of stories fit the bill well enough – It's not like he couldn't relate, his children and grandchildren, if they still lived, were likewise trapped on the other side of the crack. With his stories springing from the same mind as his random associations, they integrated seamlessly with his haphazard appellations for the canopy's patterns, and so they became accepted among the Trenzalorians, at some point becoming something that had been established for generations, and existing as such around him a he struggled to hold on to the memory of the long-withered children whose perceptions and interpretations had helped to shape the legends.

Since he'd had a lot of time there, those stars had almost become glowing, heat-wallowing objects of his madness, of a life of thrills that, no matter how iron his determination to protect the village, was not an easy one to give up. He'd never liked sitting still and made a point of never getting much practice in it over the years, so that he'd almost completely forgotten how to do it by the time he met Amelia, so fidgety moments were to be expected, and he couldn't always fill them with rambling at the local kids (or Handles), not when he was keeping a watch out for stray cybermen in the middle of the night.

It figures then, that he'd catalogued and identified most of those dots, produced hand-made star-charts annotated with each astronomic object's names and brief allusions to any personal encounters he might've had there; Sometimes, he'd use that knowledge to impress the local kids and ask them to point at a celestial body so he could entertain them with stories of the local populace, or, if those were nonexistant or not suitable for casual storytelling, he'd talk about something in its vincinity.

Nevetina was one of those points he could identify, far, far away so it could only be seen as a pale cloudy dot by the naked eye; And while his ventures there were nothing fit to be told to young children, nor likely to comfort a populace that lived in daily fear of Daleks or the man who was fighting to prevent something like that hell from starting up again, his encounters with the local civilizations were still something worth describing, as much as he wished that they'd taken place under happier circumstances; He'd gotten to a point where he felt ready to stop denying that part of his life, and he'd be doing both Clara and himself a disservice if he didn't fully follow through with it, not that his Elaborations on the Galaxy's people called for more than vague allusions to the background threat of the war.

 

One place he _couldn't_ see, however, was the Milky way. He couldn't catch even the most rudimentary, distorted smear of light from Sol, and that vexed him as much as it probably should, in a way that the presence of the misplaced bit of milky way just beyond the crack could not fully remedy.

Even if he had been able to see it, the light years in-between would have assured that any artificial lights he'd have picked up from that direction would belong to the Silurian civilization, with some bulb lit by a young Vashtra possibly somewhere mixed in there, but it would have been something, a purely symbolic comfort at least.

It might have helped the ironic situation where the humans of Trenzalore, isolated as they were by centuries of besieging, learned most of what they knew about the world that gave birth to their ancestors from an exile like himself; Although, by the time he came to Trenzalore he'd probably spent more time on and around Earth and its people than he ever did on Gallifrey, though Trenzalore soon ramped up a similar count; But he still couldn't describe the Earth from the same sort of perspective that a native might have, like someone who had grown up with Earth as their “default”.

That might have been why the Nevetina Galaxy stories proved moderately popular, because the children of Christmas town recognized themselves in Clara's equally provincial colonist echo.

But ever so often one of the older kids would recognize this “Clara” character from a wildly different context in another story, and turn to the others in a whisper: “Little sis, did he ever tell you that one? The part with the haunted house perhaps? No, it's not a ghost story, it's a...”

 

Eventually, though, it seems unavoidable that he gets so lost in the labyrinth of his thoughts and reminiscences that he loses track of what he was supposed to be thinking, or doing, or pondering in the act of deciding what to do next, and leaves behind a few half-read books and unfinished sketches as he starts to become aware of a tingling itch in his fingers that he generously chose to interpret as a sure indication that he'd sat still for too long.

There's probably a deeper restlessness somewhere, gaping deep within at the root of his being, some existential _horror vacui_ that sublimates into the drive that keeps him moving, but it's not something he wants to be alone in a room with.

Starting at the edges, he's overtaken by something like a dry and chilly kind of energy that feels somehow virtual, like the cold comfort of sugar and caffeine after nights without sleep, or a feeling like an immediate threat forcing him into continued vigilance, and the well-practiced circuits of his mind began concocting a plan that he hadn't asked them for.

At some point in a process of tentative idleness being repeatedly interrupted by increasingly less half-baked preparations, he made his decision, with a result that was probably rather predictable, but the kind of 'default reaction' that he was willing to risk that for:

It was time for a little expedition.

Tomorrow, the Doctor would be venturing into the depths of the lower city.

 


	7. Day 7

Day 7

 

 

He packed a torch, a handful of measuring instruments, some of which (such as his Yoyo and a box filled with jelly babies) might also be repurposed to alleviate any spontaneous boredom he might experience, a few potentially useful contraptions that looked like they had been screwed together from random objects on the fly (probably because they had been), including some that he'd been waning to test for a while, a sightseeing guide for the lower city that he'd picked up in the university dorms he'd previously visited, a change of clothes, and a few provisions – judging by his scans, the greater infrastructure down there seemed mostly intact, but there was no sure way to know whether all sections of the lower tunnels would be just as hospitable as the upper towers without being able to ascertain the state of the cables and relays themselves.

He'd probably find out soon enough, probably the moment he stepped foot in a given section when the light flickered to life... or perhaps rather didn't, but if the power grid should indeed be working all the way down, he might want to take a look at its architecture and the materials used one way or another, just to satisfy his curiosity.

As the denizen of a millenia-old spaceship, he wasn't exactly flabbergasted, but one of these days, he _would_ like to know how the Fabronian engineers had constructed their surprisingly durable machinery, or at least, he'd like to know if he'd guessed right with respects to their method – some sort of self-replicating component, perhaps? Possibly a pseudo-biological gel used as either a preservation layer or partially crystallized to serve as the conductive agent?

That might be self-sustaining for a long time, but would not be immune to suffering contamination, individual segments spoiling or corrosion at the junctures with the metallic parts, and therefore require at least _some_ maintenance now and then (not unlike the afore-mentioned millenia-old spaceship), but for all he knew he might find a few sections of the city down there where the power lines were distinctly out of order; After all, the surface towers were the newest parts of Xalax right now.

In any case, he could no depend on having electricity available at every step of the way, and his relative interest in the power line question kept him mindful enough of the issue to inspire him into bringing some provisions, which involved him producing a simple suede bag from his pockets that, perhaps fittingly, looked like something out of a medieval fantasy RPG, and stuffing a good helping of those nutrition cubes, an even mix of the orange “day of hard work” ones and the juicy-dark-green-with-olive-spots “light sugary snack” ones.

He also took a bigger-on-the-inside canister of drinking water, a selection of teabags (the easiest means to make water less boring) and a light blanket, then he made way for the nearest major elevator.

He'd used some of those before to get around in the city; There were large public ones with enough space to hold a small crowd and seats around the walls, most likely for the elderly, the infirm and the exceptionally lazy, at times there were several of them lined up in the same wall, not all of them with the same height and depth available, a place sort of like a tram station with announcement screens indicating when each elevator would be arriving, and several ones to chose from and change between if the last one you rode didn't bring you all the way to where you were going – At Xalax' height, this must've been a loud and crowded place filled with daily hustle and bustle, with sharply-dressed businesspeople, little old ladies, parents with small children and longtime bachelors on their morning commute to work all colluding, but now, everything was standing still.

At least for this particular microcosm, the day had come when all the clocks stop ticking, except they didn't; In this particular instance, the clocks had outlasted their makers.

Bess the efficiency and prudence of those Fabronian engineers, too: The screens in question, all lights and machines had turned themselves off to preserve power, but once some tiny sensor detected a person stepping through the spacious door arch, all of it flickered to life with hardly a delay, telling him exactly where most of the lifts had spent their lonely centuries; As one might imagine, most of them had been left close to the surface layer after one last trip of ferrying the populace they had carried day in day out into the daylight so they could follow through with the evacuation.

After a quick glance at a wall-mounted diagram with a comforting similarity to a 20th century Earth subway chart, he determined which of them would take him the furthest down, sonicked it open, pressed the key at the very bottom of an ample selection of available buttons and waited for the automaton to hum into motion.

He felt a surprisingly gentle shake at the lift accelerated, the last protests of inertia, and then, both he and the elevator were on their way down.

The city's pomp was once more apparent in the interior design, the tiles of red marble and dark granite still shone underneath him, the handrail looked like brass but felt smoother, almost like some kind of plastic or ceramic, and above him, several lavish lamp illuminated what was basically just a place to people to stand still in while they were being conveyed upward or downwards, albeit one that was the size of a small ballroom.

If one were to rearrange all of its area in strictly rectangular shape, he had no doubt that the entirety of Clara's apartment would have fit here snugly.

Its effect might have been different when it was thickly packed with the multitudes of Fabron, when all the bling of this prosperous city might have been contrasted with the diverse crowd, but with just one passenger loitering near its center, the spacious cabin couldn't look anything other than pointlessly huge.

Another aspect of its fastidious bragging were the walls – shiny tiles matching the floor up to the handrails where they weren't covered by brown leather seats, then, huge one-piece mirrors that were probably intended to make the room look brighter in addition to their obvious shininess – He'd have preferred any kind of windows that let him have a look at the walls, and perhaps the mechanisms that drove this thing or the kind of structures this passed through, the layers of city in-between.

But even the barest, most boring wall might have been preferable to the silent, solemn company of his own reflection.

He already knew what he looked like, he could do without the reminder.

Even the doors and buttons were somewhat reflective, their shiny copper-like surfaces matching the handrails.

When the doors finally opened, the different design and make of the corridors made it apparent that it was the work of a different time with different sensibilities or concepts for aesthetics.

The strong rusty-red coloration of the walls and the preference for sharp edges over curves made everything look smaller and darker despite the high ceilings – the elevator opened up into a huge, semicircular hall with various large corridors branching out from it like sunbeams, and in it's center was another thing that was taboo to the people who'd built the surface, but left here as a witness of the past and a warning, with an engraved metal plate on the side of its pedestal explaining its history: It was a large statue out of something that resembled but probably wasn't bronze, depicting a middle-aged man with long bushy hair, a long, flowing cape, laden with heavy jewelry including large elaborate earrings, light vambraces whose design clearly indicated that they were more for decoration than protection, a coronet with the basic shape of two interconnected rings through which the wearer's forehead spots might have been visible, and the long specter that went all the way from the pedestal to an arm he was somewhat stretching forward.

He was, according to the inscriptions, a wealthy and influential entrepreneur who had once sponsored renovations to this part of the city; As this had occurred in a time period where electronic information storage and digital images were already available, the right side of the pedestal held names, pictures and brief biographies of both the artist and the person depicted.

In the Doctor's opinion, the second one was kind of superfluous, given that the rich guy was already immortalized in this huge statue up there that left little doubt as to what he looked like, but he supposed that having it there for comparison did at least allow attentive observers to appreciate how closely the artist had matched him.

In the picture, the man didn't look nearly as strict or lordly as his metallic likeness made him look; He presented himself not with the stern forward gaze the artist had given him, but a wide smile that radiated confidence, but hadn't completely lost a natural, youthful quality despite the creases at the corners of his mouth and the gray streaks in his otherwise dark bush of fine, tightly coiled hair. Various decorative clips topped off with precious stones adorned his mane, his robes were dyed in strongly saturated purples and blues, its upper portion parting to reveal a strip of his broad chest, his skin a warm shade of dark brown, and unlike his statue, he wasn't wearing a cape, at least not at the time this picture was taken. Despite his conformity with the fashions of his time, he didn't seem to have lost sight of the humble beginnings alluded to in his biography, and spent a lot of his new-found fortune on projects that were meant to benefit the public.

The artist, by contrast, was a lanky, slim thing who didn't seem to have figured out in time what to do about having to be in a picture: The photograph had probably tried their best, but the man, a young, peachy-skinned individual with long, honey-colored hair, a simple ring-like headdress and clothes that would have looked unremarkable if not for their odd, almost luminescent shade of blue, just generically smiled into the camera with visible hints of embarrassment in his face.

The Doctor recognized his name, though.

This fellow was mentioned in quite a few books and texts, he'd even looked up some of his paintings to get the references. Awkward as he looked, this youth had gone on to become quite the influential artist and architect in his day – When these pictures were taken, they were probably part of something that was supposed to signify and display prosperity and hopefulness, but later historical events tinged their sight with the uniquely bitter taste of irony that only regret for past foolishness could procure – And this was something he knew very well, and kept in mind as he proceeded through the lower city.

It's splendor must have felt quite ambiguous to its inhabitants; Too illustrious to bury or destroy in a dramatic manner, but too loaded with implications and associations to be rejoiced in. The many many visitors this plaza must have seen every day probably felt rather ambivalently about the giants whose shoulders they walked on, awed by their power and achievements, but ever-conscious of the warning contained in their atrocities – and like all who as much as whitewashed history, they had been damned to repeat it.

And this wasn't a sentiment he would have been a stranger to; He didn't need to come all the way to the Nevetina-Galaxy, nor even make himself suffer through some far too nostalgia-tinted civil war reenactment on Earth – All the way back on Gallifrey, they'd had the Death Zone and the Tomb of Rassilon inside, a barren stretch of rocky land that had remained undisturbed for ages yet perfectly functional at the time(s) he ended up wandering around in it, much like the non-ruins of Xalax.

They had been to frightened, too full of misplaced respect to dismantle, deal with or even breach a relic from a time when they would kidnap the universe's other residents and make the fight to the death for cheap entertainment; The one person who _did_ breach it – Borusa – didn't do it to show the public the implications of their ancestor's more problematic legacy, but to _emulate_ those bygone days.

But was it a wonder that they'd pick themselves leaders like that, or the sort that wouldn't think twice of annihilating most of the universe, the decision that spelled all of their doom?

One truth remained inescapable for Humans, Fabronians and Time Lords alike: Those willing to forget, or as much as whitewash history, were damned to repeat it.

 

Aside from the vastly different aesthetic, though, the lower city was ultimately a continuation of the upper one, or the other way around, a growth of more of the same stuff that there hadn't been enough of, and as such, it was still filled with basic city things: Shops, housing, various public buildings, offices, workplaces, transit, all the things one could find on the surface just with another flavor of pompous grandiosity; In the end, it was all just rooms people had stood around in at various times of the day, carried things in and out of, or listened to other people to – and he was somewhat disappointed with himself, to fall prey to this kind of fatigue just as he'd descended to what many might deem, the most mysterious part; For it wasn't even disappointment. With River to one-up, Rory to assure or enthuse, or Amy to share the sense of wonder and adventure with and have their energy feed off each other, he thinks he might have maintained his capacity to absorb and keep absorbing with openness and appreciation, but he's no longer fully sure, simply because their days together lay so far in the past by now, and having humored that thought just made it all worse.

He didn't that the wide glittering in his eyes was ever truly faked, but that didn't mean that it didn't require some effort,or perhaps rather a form of supply to keep it going.

In spite of the cold, dampening feeling floating downwards past his shoulder blades, and the way it made Xalax' corridors seem more constricting than the endlessness he'd felt before, he pushed onwards as if to prove himself wrong.

It was like having gigabytes of music available, but having thoroughly worn out the few songs he could think of at the top of his head, and like with that particular problem, one potential solution could be to pick something at random; So he marched down the corridors without aiming for anything in particular, driven mostly by moody foolishness and frustration about the fact that he kept sabotaging himself at his attempts to get himself lost so he could explore and find a way, always solving the puzzle too early before it acquired a satisfying degree of difficulty because his experience and vigilance worked against him there and were too rooted in habit to be turned off when it was convenient, their none too rare lapses following completely whimsical patterns.

 

He could still have traced the way back to the elevator he'd arrived in by the time he decided to do what he'd been meaning to do for a long time, and found himself a power line to break open; So far, he hadn't come across any section of the city that was out of commission, not even down here – from doorways to machinery to computers and smaller individual robots, everything inside Xalax had obeyed each of his wishes like his own limbs, and that gave him a good idea of how the Fabronians must have seen themselves, not just as rulers living comfortable lives, but as _masters_ that shaped the world around them according to their whims, a world that had ended up melting away because it had been unable to withstand something as dynamic and inconstant as a person's will, the erosive weather of their ambition and fury, and the warring visions of multiple people who wanted to make their hopes manifest in physical reality – they would all have needed an own world to themselves, but they all wanted _this_ one, it wouldn't do to remodel one of the countless barren rocks out there in their own image.

This city, however, had been _built_ to comply and be malleable to their wishes, a vast biome of their own, as different from forests, seas, mountains and savannahs as those were to each other.

There was probably still a list of restrictions in place, at least in times of stability, a fixed list of privileges assigned to every citizen that was automatically enforced and administrated through the computer systems, to prevent things like young children turning off the city's main power generators.

He'd previously assumed that those were somehow programmed into those mysterious key crystals the locals had used to open doors and access computers and devices, but after he'd finished cracking open that power line, he was certain – and surprised.

He'd guessed wrong, no organic material, not here. Perhaps his mind had defaulted to that option because it was the solution the Gallifreyan engineers had found to that problem, inspired by the amazing capacity for self-repair and self-organization exhibited by living beings, and especially those native to Gallifrey. But he could see how others might reject that approach for the creation of durability, after all, life's processes of regrowth, while seemingly autonomous, could also be material-consuming and was ultimately finite.

Instead, the Fabronian's solution was akin to another thing that, while objectively as finite and mutable as everything else in this universe, was often thought of as a symbol for something hard and persistent: Jewel and Stone.

The cores of the conduits consisted not of biological goop, but of semi-crystalline material alike if not identical to the key crystals themselves, the process of activating the former with the latter the result of an induced resonance within the material due to its similar makeup.

From observing the line reacting to input from his screwdriver, he could guess that the pattern of sonic pulses he'd found to work as an acceptable substitute after a lot of tweaking and refining of something that yielded an initially quite minor response was a good emulation of what the signal from an actual key crystal would be.

Of course he'd researched the material pretty early on, longing to understand the one thing that baffled his experienced understanding most persistently, but even though each and every Xalaxian must have used them constantly in their daily lives, information on them was scarce, and that was bizarre. It was like no one in 21st century earth knowing what plastic was; It held the stench of a rotten secret, something with an answer along the lines of “You don't want to know”, something satisfying enough for people to rob themselves o the contentment born from ignoring it, perhaps even an _open_ secret they collectively didn't ask about, given the ubiquity of those stones – Judging by the documents, it was something that had once been classified and possibly still been at the time Xalax was abandoned, unknown enough for the technology to be lost – for one thing, no one on “modern day” Fabron (meaning the time of his first visit, the age after human colonists) seemed to use them anymore.

From what little he'd been able to scrape together, they had been in use since late in the First Period of Florescence but not fully mastered until the Second, that people had tended to wear them integrated somewhere into their bucketloads jewelry, in spots that denoted importance like in crows, necklaces or gauntlets on the wearer's favored hand, that their composition and likely the process of how to make them had gone unchanged for long periods of time, and that one of the central plants for making the material was located on the lowest levels of Xalax.

For something that had existed so long, mythologizing was unavoidable, so a vague association with the “Resting place of the goddess” legend existed in literature, a stylized term for the things was something the TARDIS first rendered as 'divine amber', like how amber is the hardened form of something that flows out where a tree is “wounded” – the actual term, now that he understood it in its native dialect, was a more technical-sounding word denoting 'body liquid released upon damage', a general, abstract term that could also contain blood or ichor as a subset, the word term a bit of an oxymoronic exospeak gag that combined religious with detached, pseudo-scientific language, something almost like an euphemism for something suspiciously convnient.

All this... not so much explicit secrecy but sheer lack of mention was beginning to make him think that there might have been some true kernel to that 'goddess' legend after all, obviously no actual divinity, but _something_ down there that had been an inexplicable black box for the Fabronians who had nonetheless come to rely upon it in their daily lives.

The Doctor supposed that he would have to dig a little deeper to find out... literally.

The answers may or may now be further down in this underground complex, if only he could keep any silly cynical listlessness from slowing his gears to a halt, or he might never find out.

Sure, he'd been known to let himself fall into the habit of telling him he could always come back later, especially when it came to postponing a story's ending, but after having escaped his 'sheduled ends' at Lake Silencio and Trenzalore, he was quite aware that even a life that could stretch on for thousands of years was ultimately finite, and that he had no time to waste.

 

He didn't know exactly why he made sure to leave the the wall plating he'd opened to get access to the power duct neatly closed up, as it was highly unlikely that anyone was ever going to walk through this corridor ever again, let alone use the facilities that this crystalline conduit supplied with electricity, and leaving at least the outer wall plating open might've been helpful in recognizing this place for the sake of orientation. It was one of these things that seemed like the “proper” thing to do before you started to question why you were doing them.

He'd imagine that Clara might joke about the remainder of his very vestigial respect for other people's property acting up, although a more likely culprit was the force of habit born from centuries of having to cover his tracks during covert investigations of all sorts, during many of which he'd had to sneak a peek at the insides of various technological devices without anyone noticing that he'd been here before he'd had the chance to escape.

By the time he was sonicking the last few bolts back in, he'd remembered that there was no one in this entire city who could possibly have chased after him, but stopping halfway through would've felt even sillier, despite the afore-mentioned lack of spectators.

It's not that he was opposed to silliness, per se, but he'd really really prefer for it to be always deliberate.

 

Leaving his pointlessly finished work behind, the lone wanderer continued on his lack of path, putting one foot in front of the other and focusing his observations on nothing more than that.

The little corridor he was following led to a large metal bulkhead, and it, once persuaded by a swipe of his dear old screwdriver, opened to reveal an eager darkness that excitedly lit up like Christmas decorations, outlining what had been a street lined with little shops.

Stepping into the confounding mundane sight, he became surrounded by perfectly even surfaces stretching on to his right and his left, doorways, shop windows and colorful advertizing lights arranged like tiles, but, apart from that unifying aesthetic choice, not much more refined or unique in their attention-grabbing techniques than comparable businesses on earth.

Starting from the section he'd entered, the bright letters of shop signs flickered to life forwards and backwards from his position, along with the square lights on the ceiling and the flood lights illuminating the odd statue in the center of what was once a wide avenue that was still somewhat removed from the hustle and bustle of the main streets, an inviting, cozy place to buy lunch or clothes in a lively but not crowded atmosphere and what passed for urban flair on a planet where that didn't involve noisy vehicles and the night sky.

In some ways it was not unlike the promenade of a space station with it's completely closed-off structure in completely man-made surroundings, bar the feeling of being a small, mildly remarkable part of a greater whole that hadn't merited a higher than average level of ceiling height and showyness; Even the pompous statues of wealthy benefactors or sponsors were fairly spaced apart, not because anyone had deliberately held back from showing off, but because this was not the primary place to do it – this was where you went for an agreeable but no extraordinarily remarkable afternoon of drinking with your co-workers or the monthly shopping trip with your regular circle of friends.

If he allowed himself to let the insignificant details blend together, he could easily picture Clara sitting on one of the many empty tables behind the glass doors and walls of a locality, consuming a variety of caffeinated beverages alongside P.E., the bowtie-wearing history teacher and perhaps a few other co-workers whole faces he hadn't bothered to retain, never mind that most cafés on 21st century Earth didn't have doors that opened by sliding upwards or synthesizers behind the counters, though certain phases of earth fashion would have been very capable of producing such chairs that were basically gaudy miniature thrones decorated with unabashedly synthetic imitations of precious stones, metals and jewels, which were the tried and true thing here on Fabron, unlike the artistically bent rods of metal that passed for furniture in some of the more “modern-styled” establishments on the surface.

Those specifics weren't a significant part of the fundamental nature of this place as a space for activities and interactions it had payed host to, or the kind of place it was now that all tables were empty.

There was no use in pretending that the empty localities were merely closed – even if you didn't get close enough to their doors to notice the total lack of any signs announcing opening hours, or without the knowledge that the Xalaxians had valued their independence from the sunlight and implemented a system of shifts, there were places on Earth where cities this big tended to have businesses open all around the clock, if not all of them, then at least different types at different times.

As in any true metropolis, the streets in the city center never came to be fully abandoned – Even in the middle of the night, there should be music booming from night clubs and drunk revelers shambling from one locality to the next until the bakeries opened at the cusp of dawn – instead, the garish, colorful lights were completely at odds with the complete lack of sound and activity, among which even the steps of a single man seemed like a sacrilege against the ghostly silence of a graveyard, only a great deal more impressive, an entire necropolis without the advantage of showing just enough sighs of decay for raiding it to become archeology instead of grave-robbing, though the chronological age of the place would certainly have qualified it as the former.

The mannequins in the clothing shops were still stocked with the clothes that the store owners probably still thought of selling back when they didn't know when exactly the order for the evacuation would be given – some might not have believed that it would really happen until the very instant the alarm bells had made themselves audible and have been correspondingly optimistic about the amount of products they might have gotten to sell that day, or about the chance that they might one day return – there were absolutely no signs of any plundering, no spiders that would have crawled all this way through the complex to leave their cobwebs here, or anything to witness to the fact that those shops had not been abandoned just yesterday.

 

The only logistical hindrance to a smooth, effortless and uncomplicated return of the multitudes that had once filled this place was the fact that they had all lived, died and been buried in some places apart from the city most of which had been forgotten for centuries by now.

And here he was, a complete outsider alien to this world, witnessing this place just as they would have recalled it on their deathbeds: That one table left with only two chairs because the occupants of another had taken the rest and inserted them into a crowded circle, that one screen advertizing a special discount on household robots of a certain brand, that one mannequin standing empty in a shop window, surrounded by some of its fellows that were displaying slight variations of dark green tunics, perhaps indicating that another such tunic had been among the last things to be sold here, unless some kind of phantom had somehow broken in and stolen it, and discounting that possibility, there was a good chance that its purchaser was forced to leave his brand new robe sitting in a drawer somewhere to escape with little more than what they were carrying on their person the moment the alarm bells sounded.

 

This road had probably led some other place other than nowhere, and signified more than just an endless straight line to the people who'd been walking up and down its length, on their ways to places that, to be something beyond than empty spaces, steel and concrete, required the presence office clerks and business owners that had been it's lifeblood, it's pulse that pumped sounds, smells and conversation from residential areas to business districts, to party facilities and back to the residential areas once again, their motion uniting into big streams and highways to spread out into little capillaries again as each individual took they place between the cogwheels of society, each of them feeling small and insignificant inside the city's massive expanse, but without them, Xalax was nothing but skeletal, calcified remains of something that had skipped the early stages of being a cadaver all together.

In a few billion years, when this planet's burnt up remains were kneaded into a smooth dough by its expanding mother star, a large structure of metal and concrete would break apart and scatter into the orbit, and the onlookers, if any, might wonder what it might have been and never find out; Never again would these streets fill with song; Never again would the signs denoting the names of the streets pay host to meaning.

Even to a curious outside visitors, they explained little more than where to find more of the same, and what ever points of interests had accounted for the direction and positioning of this street were now empty and abandoned, leaving nothing to keep him following its direction for longer than he could sustain that one whim, and before long, he turned and followed the next smaller alley he came across, following those capillaries to their ever finer extensions, away from those larger vessels that lacked everything else that would have identified the busy streets they one were.

 

The tiny alleyways he continued on instead again reminded him of Venice, and its central island completely covered in city. It, too, has small crooked alleyways that were as packed with souvenir shops and hotels as the larger ones, the buildings towering like large walls on either side – The alleyways of lower Xalax were straighter, but at least Venice had still had the sky above and the strips of space above the waters, beside the bridges. The “outskirts” of Venice were located on other islands, many of which had been assigned specific functions back in the day – In Xalax, streets and facilities closely hugged, and were partially built into, the outer walls of the sphere. The poor neighborhoods ranging into the neighboring caverns might have been counted, but the caverns were hardly any more open or wide than the tunnels and lacked the benefit of regularity, at that.

But because even the Xalaxians needed to keep all the quieter, less important stuff somewhere, all the backs of buildings and access panels to regulate the supply of water and electricity, an analogous bit of convention established itself, the centers away from the centers, or the atriums, backdoors and structures in the squares in-between the criss-cross of major roads.

The businesses might've fit neatly into the walls of the street, but one of them that was flanked by two doors and had therefore piqued his curiosity enough for the Doctor to chose those specific exits, turned out to have a large, greenhouse-like structure in the back where customers could sit “outside” on tables and chairs (amid decorative plastic plants, no less) without taking up space on the main streets. Both access-ways actually unified at the back of it, and continued into the structure, the walls frequently interrupted by metal grids behind which one could see the various supply pipes that the architecture of the Second Period of Florescence had otherwise so efficiently hidden away, the bowels and sweat glands of Xalax.

What seemed so advanced that it had become indistinguishable from magic – not for him, but perhaps for some of his acquaintances from the 20th and 21st centuries – was, ultimately, the graceful coordination of many complimentary sleights of hand.

At first it probably would have looked somewhat impressive to see some pompous Fabronian extend their arm, all the heavy jewelry obscuring that the little stone on their vambrace actually fulfilled a non-decorative purpose, and watch the walls recede and open at their wishes, but this being a commonplace technology that was casually used every day, the Xalaxians would eventually just have seen it as “how we open doors”, and gotten used to do it with the same casual swipes that humans of Clara's era used on their smartphones, annoyedly fussing over devices that would have been science fiction just two decades prior, seeming to barely register their swooping advance.

Sometimes it seemed ungrateful or pretty silly that they'd invented pocket-sized computers and used them mainly for social posturing and finding new ways to get on each other's nerves, the Doctor could never resist rolling his eyes when confronted with the results of that, the endless barrages of photographs with vaguely fowl-like expressions, and as much as he'd stubbornly insist on his indignation in the heat of the moment, in some of his quieter moments he considered that maybe it was his outsider's perspective that was partially to blame – After all, to the humans, their rapid development _would_ be normal and mundane -

And both Fabronians and Time Lords could have profited from not taking themselves so seriously all the time and seeing themselves in a more relative, balanced light.

 

After all, they hadn't all been so different in the end, humans, Fabronians and Time Lords – there were a lot of beings out there with far greater disparities to any of the three, and for all that separated them, they shared many significant universals – the Doctor was reminded of this when he found out where many of those 'alleyways' he'd been following ended up ending: A cylindrical room with many narrow entrances, it's foundations resembling a simplisticly-drawn sun whose beams turned into a labyrinth somewhere along the way – But as with the street before it, the particularities of how it was made and what advanced technology had gone into creating it were, at best, secondary to what it was.

What it was could be recognized with a single glance: A playground for children.

And now: An _abandoned_ playground which _no_ children.

Since Fabronians weren't descended from tree-dwelling apes, there was somewhat less emphasis on climbing-based toys – the big, colorful structures instead seemed to carter to anyone wishing to play hide-and-seek, a distant, much simplified distillation of Fabron's plains with their rocks, shrubs and boulders.

But the idea that spinning motion was somehow funny or entertaining – there were a row of metal seats shaped to accommodate a tin posterior, that could be spun around like Earth office chairs, and two elevated platforms of different heights that would spin around their own axis, the higher of which was also slightly tilted, not exactly a merry-go-round and likely to have been a balance-based game for slightly older children, but under different circumstances, he might've found it inviting enough to give it a try –

Now, however, the ghostly emptiness of the place seemed to decree an unspoken law against it.

There you could see the influence of one's viewpoint and perspective, for had it simply been too late for children to be out, this place would have been just as empty but not forbidding in the least – the same elements of its design that were once supposed to make it inviting made it melancholy now, the bright colors, the cartoonish faces painted here and there, the fact that this place's main attraction were once playthings for children, even what looked like a skylight, but couldn't possibly be,given how deep underground this level was.

It was a fairly good artificial substitute that, as one scan with the sonic revealed, closely mimicked the properties of moderate daylight, but in this context, it looked more like a spotlight shining on a witness stand or court exhibit, a silent accusation that those responsible for the city's ruin would never see.

But the Doctor _was_ here to see it, not that it told him anything he didn't know before.

There were places like this in any city that had ever been abandoned.

There had been places like this on Gallifrey, too.

 

Also in this “room”, if that was the word to describe it, was the obligatory pompous statue, mounted onto the wall and sharing its pedestal with two columns of marble, almost an entire monument or shrine with a lengthy inscription underneath , which he felt somewhat resembled the interior decorations of a baroque-era church. The square, block-like geometry of the pedestal and its decorations resembled the other statues he'd seen, but the art style was subtly different, and while most of the other statues had been uniformly cafted from the same material and not even painted, this one was composed from various types of polished, valuable stone material – Most likely, the different parts of the monument – which depicted two adults and two children – had been carved individually and then stuck together.

The white marble used for the columns was probably the same material that was used for three of the hairpieces, their skin was approximated by a darker material, their robes, a variety of stones with colored patterns on them, the little girl, for example, was “wearing” something a lot like lapis lazuli, while the boy next to her – not necessarily her brother, given that he was the only one depicted with lighter skin and brown hair – was “draped” in a red gown.

Their ample jewelry was pretty much made of the same materials as _actual_ jewelry, except that it, like everything else about the statues, was carved in exquisite detail. While the knowledge that the Fabronians could artificially manufacture precious stones with relative ease made all of this seem vaguely less wasteful, the poses of the adults and the way they held what might have been specters or ritual spears made it abundantly clear that they were depicted as rulers here – a piece of propaganda and yet, an artifact almost anyone would recognize as a work of art, an important witness to the history of this city, and a monument to its former glory.

But no city or nation was ever just “glory”, or “bling” or a complex of ideas, weapons and creeds – those were what remained in legends of lost empires, but as a time traveler, he knew very well that there was much more to the authentic experience of a city – the many little hidden places, the characteristic slang and accents, the people's ways to say hello, the many little particularities that the living, breathing people would miss when they had business somewhere else, the details that looked tiny in panorama pictures.

In the end, time made monuments of everything once all other functions and purposes had been drained away, and the Doctor sincerely believed that this playground deserved to be regarded as as much of a piece of history as those statues, that it had been a vessel for just as many dreams and ideals.

And with that thought in mind, he departed from this place with a solemness speaking of reverence, and disappeared back into the shadows to continue his wanderings, following no aim other than to absorb whatever would be reflected in his eyes behind the next doorway, his unhurried pace never increasing not slowing, taking in the incomplete, fossilized impression of the city that time had left behind.

 

He presumed that this might be one of the few things that he could appreciate better than Clara – Sure, his outsider's perspective, his detachment from even his own world and his freedom to move about this city's history as he pleased made it nearly as abstract to him as something he'd only read about in a book. But that his background was so removed from Earth and its vicinity that he could look at it as an albeit fond and enthusiastic outside observer didn't mean that he didn't have any background at all;

While Clara could conceptualize, understand and even feel the implications of this place's final abandonment, only limited amounts of it would connect to the early memories that shaped her core self and affect her in an immediate, primal way, just as a person from the 19th century would see an early-2000s pop-song referencing the use of a mobile phone in a very abstract light even after receiving an explanation – In the map of her experiences, the roads of Xalax would most closely resemble a mere empty hallway, and those weren't anything unusual or disturbing outside of business hours. To her, buildings were usually frequented by smaller groups of people than the streets surrounding them, and streets involved the open air – As far as 21st century humans went, the denizen's of Southeast Asia's mega-cities might actually have come quite close to being immediately able to tell how this picture was supposed to look like; Even in their time, people on Earth had already coalesced into dense oceans whose waves their citizens had to wade through every day, but also, places where you could never possibly want for someone to talk to; Of course, few places on Gallifrey had ever been truly bustling, and both it and Fabron lacked the liveliness and makeshift-but-still-working nature of human settlements.

Though the Fabronians had probably been closer to humans in that one regard; Silent as they were now, these streets had once been filled with sound more than comparable places on Gallifrey had been – well, not this back alley perhaps, but the larger streets that could never be far in a place like this.

 

So in a sense, while he was 'seeing Xalax', he wasn't really seeing _Xalax_ as it had been when inhabited; He could guess at what it had been like, down to the actual 'feel' of the city in its glory days, in large parts due to the amount of literature he'd checked out and vast experience in extrapolating from the sights; In a way, he was encountering the _Legend_ of Xalax, an empty, foreboding Xalax where everything was heavy with implication.

And perhaps it was only because he made a deliberate point of trying to cultivate appreciation and allowing himself to 'get into' the feeling, he was beginning to feel its shadow and history looming above him, found himself imagining what these thought-to-be-sacred halls might mean to one of this world's inhabitants or some impressionable young soul if they were here alongside him, though never without a part of his mind remaining detached, distinctly less impressed for its ability to put this place and its history into a much, much larger perspective even as he strode calmly from one magnificent sight to the other.

 

One advantage of exploring a foreign place as a stranger from a faraway, advanced place was that few things of the worlds he crossed through could keep him wherever he wanted to go, and the mischievous boy inside him could never resist trespassing through the spaces that would otherwise have been forbidden, the secret, the mysterious, those normally reserved for the rich and the important and whoever else thought themselves above their fellow man, mocking their hubris by 'profaning' what was, ultimately, just another bit of regular space,

As such, it may have been no small wonder that the lone traveler diverted his path to the city Governor's fortress once he realized that it ought to be close to the level he was in now.

 

It had been a complex of thoroughly pragmatic purpose from the 'austere' period or whatever that meant by the Xalaxians' standard who'd defined the Style of the time mainly as being opposed to the Second Florescence's excesses. Though the creativity of sentient minds did a honorable job at circumventing this limitation as much as possible, the minds of beings such as humans or Fabronians were ultimately still bound to the words and images by which they expressed their thoughts, and the works of those who had come before them to look for inspiration, comparison and a context in which to put their works.

And for the architects who had build the black building structure, their context had been the city of Xalax as an already well-explored, long-existing reality, the familiarity with & necessity for three-dimensional engineering that came with vast underground complexes of which Xalax was only one of the vastest and most famous on a world that mastered them in its need for underground shelters, and the Xalaxian love of innovation that meant that if vast rebuilding in the center of and around the pipes, cables and pillars of a larger structure was necessary to make it more efficient, it would be done with little consideration for momentary comfort and a gaze clearly turned toward the larger future in which the building would be of use.

It helped, perhaps, ironically, that the Fabronians lived longer than some of your average humanoids, so that periods of change comprised smaller percentages out of their lives, and that they thus could expect to spend much longer enjoying the fruits of each innovation, in contrast to some civilizations where that had led to stagnation.

In that sense, the Fabronians could be said to be somewhat in-between humans and Time Lords, which renewed the traveler’s however distant and primarily playfully-situational sense of affinity for these halls.

And despite the architect's desire to get away from Second Florescence doctrines and aesthetics their design was nonetheless inspired by that Era's fondness of space-module-like design, but in a stripped down, efficient form that could only have come in the more somber time after it: Though it was a 'Governor's Fortress', it never served the purpose of some of the more rococo creations of its predecessor, it had never housed halls for banquets or balls, nor the cultural facilities that were relegated to other places, not least the still existing pompous buildings lower in the city, but had been constructed strictly for the nitty-gritty of administration and organization, to give it one centralized point from which to operate – Large parcels of space were allotted to computer hardware, and even the actual parts intended to become the governor's dwelling were optimized for security, not comfort.

Markedly, the 'governor' mentioned here refers to the governor of the city proper, who would be equal in rank (and perhaps superior in prestige) to the governor of the various imperial provinces; The political leadership of the whole empire were situated elsewhere.

The greatest downside of centralization was, of course, the vulnerability incurred if the central site were somehow blocked or taken out, so copies of all physical and digital files as well as secondary personnel were stationed in several smaller but similar sister-buildings throughout the complex to service citizens closer to their homes and substitute for their colleagues in the central block.

The resulting building was, physically, an assemblage of dark blocks each of them the height of one of the city's levels, forming two step-pyramids on top of each other, one pointing up, one down, each component block a black, labeled cube with rounded edges and sometimes, discrete doors and windows embedded in the structure.

What initially attracted him as a long-time abhorrer of boring administrative tasks to this sphere was something by the unassuming name of 'Third Imperial Archive', the number here being unrelated to the time of its inception or its overall significance compared to other buildings, but denoted its _function._ As everything in that building complex had been intended for loal governance, it wasn't even the Third Imperial Archive for the entire Empire, but specifically that of middle and central Xalax, though up-links of the other such archives were obviously present to make it easier to sift through them all in a comprehensive manner. Frequently maintained backups of the other two Xalaxian archives were also present, and while the large number of such archives might, at first glance, be ascribed to the city's size and population, the technology present at the time would have made a centralized storage possible, nor would Fabronian culture lead the citizens to cling to older systems out of convenience –

A clue to the real reason could be found in the location of those other archives, fancy demonstrative buildings largely dedicated to public entertainment, education and other uses of lavish public properties – One shared its home with a famed and much mythologized community center near the surface, housing a library, speaking rooms, restaurants, an opera hall and facilities where life skill courses were made available to the populace, another was deeper down in a structure that housed among other things, an assortment of swimming pools and wellness facilities, a gymnasium, an arena for sports and extensive pleasure gardens, both of them prestigious constructions and social gathering points.

The Third Archives, so one might conclude, were of some social significance, and, if one had spent the last few days familiarizing themselves with all things related to Fabronian civilization, such as the Doctor had, one might conclude that it was an interesting consequence of the particular quirks of this world's society –

As a world that praised both innovation and the industrious individuals that created them, yet also respected power, mystery and a concept of freedom, it was almost a necessary consequence that they had very strict laws against electronical spying and the selling of information – Otherwise, new advances would have come with new ways of controlling others and the ideals of the Empire would be tarnished – it was strictly _because_ they so believed in progress that they refused to let it be 'vilified'. (though the Doctor privately mused that they ought to have applied that same ideal to the development of weapons; If they had, Xalax may still be standing in its original, populated state, or more likely, would have evolved further still)

To ward off suspicion and reluctance toward new technology, the people's rights were guaranteed right out of the door rather than to leave a grey zone that those in power either exploited or failed to adapt to – otherwise, the Xalaxian system could not have functioned, and like anything that existed for long enough, it had thus accumulated a notion of sacredness around itself.

Of course, that a society praised and espoused certain values did not necessarily mean that they followed them, and in this heavily mechanized world, the knowledge that could be gleamed from that particular sacrilege were often all-too tempting, so despite ongoing efforts by law enforcement, there was usually some degree of privacy violations going on at any given moment, though this was usually one of those things that the Xalaxians would generally _not_ forgive their employers or politicians and a line they insisted on drawing even in some of their more corrupt eras, with the discovery thereof frequently leading to resignations or at least a clear loss of reputation where particular slimy individuals succeeded in weaseling their way out of the responsibilities, most often with the justification that the empire mustn't appear weak or divided in wartime – Again, the Doctor found it to be a predictable but nonetheless regrettable waste or chances for peace as some of those supposed 'divisions' had indeed been concerned with changing the warlike course o the world – it was not that the Fabronians had somehow lacked the potential for settling their differences, examples of individual stories of understanding abounded – It was just that few had found a way to transform their ideals and idols to suit such values, and those that did didn't find the means to popularize their ideas enough for them to catch on in a pervasive way.

But even so, companies and researchers still needed data, information on consumer behavior, health statistic, transport use, political opinions and so on.

And this is where the Imperial Third Archives come in: There, you could chose to _donate_ specific and clearly delineated packets of personal information, and, since it was done in the name of progress, advancement and increased comfort, numerous people were actually willing to line up with their personal computer terminals and key crystals in order to 'donate'.

Of course, one might doubt if everything the residents 'donated' was really put toward such grand purposes and not simply to help commercial interests, or whether less informed citizens always knew just what they were giving away and potentially laying open, but nonetheless, the system had worked for a long time.

He pictured that some of his human associates may have found this shocking, and he'd have quipped about London's many CCTV cameras and how cultural reasons let the citizens of the Netherlands to be open to the point that they didn't mind having large windows through which one could see into their living rooms – besides, just hearing that others want to get it very badly can lead people to treasure and withhold something.

His imagined remarks were rather going to waste for lack of an audience, and so was the surprise he encountered down there.

 

It was fairly well-behaved as far as surprises went, for one thing it did not actually interfere with or thwart his initial goals – He did find those archive rooms and had a merry time feeding his vast storage of impractical knowledge with unlikely life stories and interesting statistics about a long lost civilization – but then again, most civilizations eventually met their end, and besides, this might yield insight into the nature of humanoids as a whole.

But as he was already rather familiar with humanoid nature (or well – in some ways, he might never be) this is not where the surprise was to be found – Instead, he found it on the pursuit of a mere afterthought, after noticing a sign delineating the way to the city council chamber and decided to pay it a visit, just out of curiosity and to get a slight kick out of sitting in the big chairs of important people, that sort of thing - He didn't think there'd be too much to see.

– He found that the meeting chamber held some surveillance and control devices, presumably so that problems could be detected and displayed in real time and fixed just as swiftly once the responsible personnel and the AIs at their disposal had reached a conclusion, but distantly, the engineer in him might have been interested in the city's control systems and layout maps but inspecting them in person would not tell him very much that his earlier investigations had not already turned up.

The control systems themselves were indeed nothing too special, imposing perhaps to someone not used to mega cities of the magnitude and the sophisticated technology contained therein, but altogether rather consistent with the overall 'look' of this facilities – save for a door in each of the four walls, the room was an almost perfect cube with rounded corners, and smaller than a place like this could have been, had it been intended for showing off. Its dimensions were indeed smaller than some of the enormous elevator carriages he'd ridden today, and the walls were completely blank, deceptive in the simplistic, smooth, plastic-like surface that an expert glance revealed as a sophisticated 3D VR screen – When operational, this entire room including the floor and roof would have essentially served as a holochamber, covered in numerous displays, surveillance feed and data about everything from traffic to the status of environmental controls and reports of both local crime and the ongoing war fronts, with various personalized sub-displays and information feeds being available to be activated by each individual user in accordance with their function and clearance level, which, when activated, might well have made the modestly sized chamber appear like an open space in which the central table and the minimalistic yet stylish silver chairs with their round, black cushioning and slightly curved T-shaped backrests would appear to float.

The table itself, another large square to match the room's greater layout, was a large touchscreen on which documents, controls and plan proposals would have been displayed and typing and access could be done – On the sides of it, there were various ports for personal crystal keys and all manner of other secondary devices. The center of the square, which was too far in to be reached by humanoid arms, was spared from going to bed by housing a 3D projector that displayed, perhaps among other things, plans of the city.

That last detail should have been a little harder to find out, even for a well-traveled expert with universe-wide experience with various technology – It should not have taken much effort, perhaps just as little as taking a good look at the projector and pointing his sonic tool at it, but even if his experienced eyes could immediately recognize the projector itself for what it was, it would still need to be turned on for anyone to see what it typically displayed – and that, it was, but, and this was the crucial point: It was so without any contribution of the Doctor's.

When he entered the room, the display walls had been in their dark, unused state, resembling shiny black plastic, the touchscreen table had been dark, but the central projector illuminated it all with a hard orange glow, displaying some holographic city schematics as it had presumably been doing for a long, long time.

By itself, that did not mean much.

So it had been left on when the place was evacuated in a hurry; So what? In a control room designed for continuous round-the clock use in a city that spited the dictates of the surface's diurnal cycle and brimmed all day long with the activity expected of a world's capital, a standby function that would turn the projector off if it wasn't used for a particular time would not have been considered, especially if Fabronian engineering ostensibly had so little trouble keeping things running for a very long time without running out of energy.

And after all, this would have been where the final mass exodus would have been organized _from?_ That a large megacity like this could even be evacuated was nearly a miracle, and making it happen in an orderly fashion, without gridlocks or stampedes, demanded a little more precision than just hoping for the best – It follows, logically, that this mammoth project of an evacuation would have been orchestrated from this very room,allowing the legendary city's sophistication and advancement to shine one last time, and thereby mandating that the last occupants of this room would have been among the very last ones to leave, leaving no one to turn off anything they might have left on.

Almost anyone else, apart from extremely nosy trivia lovers, would probably have walked by and continued their investigations about making a brief mental note about the projector being left on.

But as the people of this universe had come to learn time and time again, he wasn't _anyone_.

At the time, he considered his choice to take a closer look the mere following of a casual whim, but something _did_ pique his interest: As mentioned before, the projector was left displaying a three-dimensional map of some of the city's schematics, somewhat zoomed in because a complete image would not have been of very much use.

But, if this place had been abandoned in the course of the evacuation, one would expect the section being displayed to have something to do with evacuation – instead, it was zoomed in on a random power duct midway through the underground complex, far away from any elevators, the surface, or any major concentrations of population, nor even something of military-strategic value and other things less deserving but more likely to have attention, such as a rich person's belongings or some politician's last known location.

That, by itself, had incidentally caused him to wonder just who had zoomed it in to that last position and why, but what he expected to be a brief inquiry into a triviality that would quickly be solved once he acquired himself a little more input for his deductions instead ended up unearthing a mystery:

The last known access, which the long-suffering machine had dutifully recorded throughout all this time after its onetime masters had long ceased to care, had been made by a system override, same as his own, leaving no authorization code to mark the user's identity – that in itself would have been par for the course for some strange counter-intuitive focus that could likely have to do with something that should have remained hidden, indeed, his initial suspicion had been something about hidden artifacts or possibly some ancient defense mechanism dating back millenia that was intended to spring a trap if anyone were to return to the city without the goodwill of its former inhabitants.

What was actually remarkable was the listed time stamp. So remarkable, indeed, that the Doctor spontaneously pulled out a notebook to do the calculations by hand, to confirm the equivalent human dates and peek at his prior notes to assure himself that he correctly understood the Fabronian dating system, before realizing the folly of such in a room linked to cruise ship sized high-end computers.

But both his manual calculations and the results produced after sonicking the touchscreen table back online were in perfect agreement: This last zoom-in had been done as late as a _month_ before him. The actual access session amounted to simple homework, a very basic superficial maintenance check of some key structures and some minute adjustments to the environmental controls that pertained to some of the park areas further down in the city, but its banality was largely offset by the fact that there should have been _no one here_ at that time.

Nowhere in this city was there _any_ sign ofactivity, apart from the occasional service robot, and this place wasn't designed to be operated by robots – indeed, there were a couple of high-end AIs wired right into the same mainframe that fed into this room's displays which could automatically adjust to equipment failures and changing environmental conditions, so there was no use in having some lesser robot use the input terminal.

He checked the long and there were further such entries, on something of a regular basis every couple of months, which meant that it wasn't just himself on another visit. At the same time, they were so irregular that an automaton was not the obvious explanation – they could be, if there was some arcane algorithm at work that initiated these accesses at certain intervals depending on some external conditions, but despite his ample background in mathematics, he could see no obvious pattern or series at work here other than this mysterious user casually checking in every every few months. His mind reminded itself to maintain a healthy skepticism, but his instincts told him that it was a person.

Just to be safe, he made sure to erase his own access from the logs, no longer so certain that it would have been the last entry ever made.

Could there still be someone living down here?

He'd made sure to thoroughly scan for life, but, if whoever it was had managed to hide during the evacuation, they must have concealed their biosigns somehow, and though the equipment he'd used ought to have been vastly superior to most things in this galaxy, he'd seen with his own eyes how advanced the Fabronians had been, how bits of their technology had still been able to baffle him – Humanity had taught him not to underestimate younger races, and he was not about to start with the Fabronians.

If he'd seen anything over these last few days, then that it would have been very easy to survive her for generations, to keep all the comforts of this entire mechanical kingdom all for oneself, the logistical concerns that would have existed in any other circumstances were not a question down here; What he'd seen of the Grand City was quite amenable to the concept that there might have been something left in her.

But who could it be, and how could they be still alive, after all these years?

Sure it was possible that there might have been someone left behind, some entrenched zealot who refused to leave their holy site behind, or perhaps some unlucky straggler who hadn't found the way in time and dared not to make their way through the newly announced neutral zone on foot. But anyone who'd stayed behind would have been long dead by now, the city had lain abandoned for many centuries by now, amounts thereof that would span many generations even for Fabronians and would constitute a long, long time even for Time Lords.

Then again, the thought was not so impossible, not when his own marooning on Trenzalore was still so recent in his mind.

And moreover, perhaps the idea stuck in his head because it had happened before, when the now long-buried dome of Xalax had sunk into the ground during the Second Apocalypse – but then, there had been a city's worth of people to perpetuate the bloodline, and if you'd gone down to Xalax in these days, you would not find it largely abandoned.

Of course, there was no need for whatever intelligence remained down here to be strictly Fabronian, or even humanoid...

The possibility was small, but it was most certainly not zero.

 

Perhaps it was just a service robot after all. Perhaps it was a system error, inevitable after all these years of disuse.

Perhaps, he was just seeing things, or simply missing Clara. Perhaps he should just had taken the TARDIS and popped straight to whenever Clara would be done doing her thing with Soldier Boy, like he had originally meant to, but no, he had to go and get distracted. He _always_ got distracted and finding himself in his second millennium, he was beginning to think that old age wasn't doing his already compromised attention span any favors, indeed, he'd been beginning to wonder if Clara could tell, which had probably created the need for distraction in the first place.

He'd bet PE was all focused and thoughtful and never took more than a few minutes to procure caffeinated beverages.

Either way, the hypothesis was far-fetched, outlandish and right in line with the biases that the minds of pack animals might be prone to, but experience had taught him never to confuse the unlikely with the impossible.

He figured that all he could do was to keep investigating; If there was anyone there, they would probably find him.

 

 


	8. Day 8

Day 8

 

Moving through the halls of Xalax felt a lot less like leisure after that discovery.

In the deep of the lower city, the silence was absolute, even the machinery barely made a sound beyond the occasional unnerving whirring – More than once, he'd found himself startled into alertness by little more than an activating ventilation duct, and felt immensely grateful that there was no one here to witness him, screwdriver drawn, attack stance assumed, infamous eyebrows flaring, death glare prepared, getting so worked up about literally thin air that he had to take a moment to calm his furiously beating hearts before he could resume working, leaning against a nearby wall with a hand over his bony chest, long fingers slipped under his hoodie, spread over the fabric of his jumper.

He took a long, deep breath.

Most likely, he was simply overdue for another dose of shut-eye, but he doubted that he would be able to sleep right now.

He soldiered on, his steps a lot more swift and concise than they had been before, covering a considerable length of corridors with far less time granted to diversions such as stopping and staring, far less assured that he basically owned the place and could take as much time as he deemed fit.

He had to get to the bottom of this, if need be, quite literally.

Distantly, he privately expressed a certain detached fascination for how the knowledge of how he ought to be very deep underground and isolated from pretty much all natural life on this world somehow made it worse and not better, surprised that after all these years, he would still have seeds of such an irrational, primal instinct left inside of him – if his species had evolved in a subterranean cave system, he would be just as likely to find this comforting and a wide expanse unsettling, but his mind already knew this, and the simpler parts of himself lacked the faculties to comprehend its persuasion.

In the meantime, his earlier speculations were stewing in his mind, and very much getting the better of him.

He would have chided himself for forgetting that he'd performed extensive scans early on and found no life down here, but on such occasions his supposedly brilliant mind would commonly work against him and remind him that the instruments he used might not have penetrated down to the deepest of the tunnels, and before long, misplaced instruments, misremembered details in the tunnel layouts, vague noises and shifting shadows readily strung themselves into a narrative that he never too seriously believed, but did keep humoring and adding to somewhere in the back of his mind.

He would find ways to outwit himself, to poke holes in what he knew to be sound logic, draw examples of unlikely events from his experience to explain away the logical impossibilities.

If there were still someone living down there, it would indeed be a major discovery and offer untold possibility, but right now, it was simply so very, very unlikely as to equal wishful thinking at best, although not completely impossible.

If it were true, it would explain that lone, unused mannequin amid the green robes back in the street he'd passed through who knows how long ago. Unaccustomed to having to actually _buy_ his possessions, it had taken him a fair bit of marching to recall that shopkeepers in department stores usually sold the clothes off their shelves, and rarely straight off the mannequins. He was a bit embarrassed of himself for that, having once been the significant other of someone who worked in a shop like that. You'd think he'd know more about shops.

Sure, you'd also think that someone with his level of creativity might be able to come up with a million more explanations that made significantly more sense without assuming unnecessary elements like some hidden away leftover resident just deciding to steal this one robe.

Maybe it was just curiosity for that period in Xalax' history where the residents had remained underground in the city, hidden away from their world, before the surface towers were built.

He might go and visit it, if he wanted to see a cut-off underground colony so badly, but then again, if something had been done before, this increased the chance that someone might have the same idea again.

He still didn't rate the probability for such a scenario very highly, but, one mark of a mature mind was the ability to entertain an idea without immediately accepting it.

 

Meanwhile, the Doctor had proceeded further down, and just like the upper city had blocks and towers in different art styles paying witness to various aesthetic movements and variations across a long history, the lower city came in layers that hailed from different time periods, when the Xalaxians had gradually built upward after being trapped underground.

What surrounded him right now was rather like the art style of those statues he'd seen near the playground, tending toward combinations of various stone or metal materials in differing colors and ornamental gold-like workings on the walls, using baseboards and skirtings instead of strictly rectangular corridors and darker, more 'indoor-like' rooms in general.

The corridors here were smaller, more labyrinthine – After the resurgence of the underground populations, the central portions of the structure had been heavily reworked to allow up and down transit between the major parts of the city, but apart from the larger ducts and the main access shafts that had been incorporated into the design, large parts o the historical city had been left as they were, when they were the upper outskirts of the place, “suburban” sections of less density and more comforts –

As one symptom of this, there were pictograms engraved in many of the walls that might have looked temple-like to a foreign onlooker, but were ultimately not too different from the statues in the eyes of someone who could actually read them, and recognize just how different they were from mere carved stone, nor even fixed in their current shape, but something like a three-dimensional billboard, and more than that – One swing of his outstretched hand, one or two seconds of his sonic whirring, and something like a cricket ball sized circle in the middle of an elaborate painting lit up, glowing symbols visible through the material of a larger area, before it began to recede, and a doorway with an arc-like top over its rectangular base shape.

He proceeded.

So far, no sign of any mystery inhabitants.

If he were being sensible, he might be getting bored or vaguely disappointed by now. Or perhaps he already was, and that's why he found himself making up this nonsense.

Dispassionately, annoyed and a little bit embarrassed, he took note of the continued symptoms of tension and agitation present on his person.

He was fairly sure that he could probably _will_ his heart rate down if he just took the time to stop, focus and concentrate, but dignifying it and its reason with that much of a remedy would have felt like a surrender.

He knew what this was, lack of sleep, survival instincts on overdrive and whatnot, and he was not new to managing that sort of thing; Recognizing this in itself should have been all he needed to correct for it without wasting further time on it.

So, he continued, on and on, step after step, quickly exchanging one corridor for the other until they seemed to melt into a whole of edges and jagged lines as he breezed through different styles, widths and purposes, and always the glowing, moving pictograms omnipresent in buildings of this 'era'. Besides the supple 'indoorsy' style of residence areas, there were its functional counterparts, also covered in the same strange cross of ancient tomb hieroglyphs and printed circuit lines, but with reflective, stone-like surfaces and proper sharp edges and straight angles much unlike the rounded corners prevalent in the levels above. He did not necessarily encounter less interesting details than in his wanderings before, but he paid a bit more mind to his cynical inner suppositions that he could probably correctly deduce just what would be awaiting him there, and how there was nothing new or surprising left under the sun – Even if there _were_ survivors here, it would not be anything new.

Yet, he felt on edge, 'spider sense' tingling, unease making its nest all over his narrow form.

A while ago he'd tried to shut up that particular worry by pulling some of those 'sweet treat' nutrition cubes from his pockets, but if anything, the expected sugar rush had only bolstered his diffuse discomfort.

All by himself, he could never be fully sure that he wasn't imagining or wildly assuming any of his perceptions or suppositions. It shouldn't matter, no one could ever be sure that they weren't actually a brain in a vat, just that it was exceptionally unlikely. The universe simply didn't spit out such clear answers – where is that one electron at any given moment? Was there someone, or something still living down here?

There were only probabilities, and that was simply the deal.

Knowing with 99% certainty was not the same as knowing nothing.

Yet, he couldn't shake this impression, and over time, it solidified, took firmer shape, assumed clearer form.

He found himself looking over his shoulder, glancing at the corners of his eyes, choosing to do things manually if he could avoid thickening his data trail.

At first, he had vaguely suspected, but by now, the sensation was rather specific and almost _palpable_.

He was being _watched_.

Or was he? Was he getting warmer, or was he just getting carried away, chasing after his own shadow again?

It was quite possible that his visit to the council chamber slash control room had tripped the locals off, if they indeed existed – his path through the city had not been exactly subtle, either, whole streets springing to life, boulevards lighting up like Christmas Trees just for one man to pass through.

He'd acted under the presupposition that there wasn't anyone here to notice him, but if there _was_ , it was practically impossible for his presence **not** to draw attention as he made his way down.

Perhaps, they were all hiding from him, _just out of sight_ – they'd have to, if their sanctuary had been breached after such a long time. Maybe they were cautiously watching him, afraid that they might be discovered after such a long time. Perhaps they were staying out of his way, hoping he would go away on his own.

Did they know that he was a stranger to this world? If they were indeed Fabronians, they should have the means to determine that, this place was full of advanced technology, and a simple bioscan should reveal him as an off-worlder. But after all this time, under circumstances like this, who could truly know?

They might be generations removed from the original stowaways, having long come to regard the technology of their ancestors as magic and the accounts left in their databanks as legends.

They could have forgotten that there _were_ other worlds for him to descend from, or that there even _was_ a world or a surface beyond the subterranean labyrith.

 

There was, of course, also the possibility – the very likely possibility – that the whole thing was just as bonkers as it seemed, and that he'd been chased by some kind of stack overflow error for several decks. Wouldn't be the fist time, not even in recent history.

Perhaps it was quite good that Clara wasn't here, for she'd only shake her head and look at him with that mixture of sadness and exasperation that he'd been seeing quite a lot recently.

He knew that she was probably one of the best people to help him make sense of all this and that he could always count on her help, and he had no _choice_ but to count on him when there was more at stake than just him, but, given the choice, he really didn't want her to see him like this...

Or, if anyone had to he'd prefer it if it was her, but, he didn't want her to think any differently of him because of this; He knew she already did, in some ways, and he'd accepted it, but... not the _important_ things.

Some things may just have been rendered impossible now, but, if nothing else, he wanted to remain known to her as her _friend_ , not some burden she put up with out of a sense of obligation or an echo of the past or some dirty little secret she was getting much too old for.

But of course, it wasn't really her who had changed – She'd stayed exactly as he'd remembered her.

 _He_ was the one who was distinctly past his expiration date these days, as both Clara herself and especially the ever delightful Mr. Pink never ceased to rub into his face.

No, thank you very much, he could handle this ancient and possibly-not-quite-abandoned city on his own, it wasn't exactly his first one and experience had to count for _something_ , at least.

Whether he found something or not, just from what he'd seen so far he'd get enough interesting anecdotes to at least reasonable compete with whatever PE had been up to over the weekend, and besides, he would probably do well to get used to solo investigations for a while, in case the happy couple decided to tie the knot; Something told him that Mr. Pink would be far less amenable to an intergalactic honeymoon than Mr. Pond had been.

No, no, there was no helping it, no use getting all mushy and sentimental here, back to work!

Just where was he? Right.

Underground city, moving wall paintings, possibly very shy hermits.

Assuming their were hermits, would they be wiped out in a few hundred years, when further nuclear explosions would melt away the surface towers, or would they survive that, too? The many layers of city rock and metal could have shielded them, that is, if they ever existed in the first place.

The whole thing was getting rather silly, he could have been conducting valuable studies instead of getting worked up over nothing;

There were better uses for his time here than merely running wild here, chasing ghosts without watching where he was going.

Where _had_ he been going?

Well, he had entered into a wider all, the walls still covered in shifting mechanical lines, as was the floor, bundles of lines flowing various ways, perhaps suggesting paths to follow, blinking lights glimmering in various corners of the room, perhaps indicative of certain functions... _which_ functions, he could not discern at a glance, but technology, no matter how alien, could be expected to follow some more or less successful concept of user-friendliness.

It wasn't supposed to be cryptic; Bad design abounded everywhere in the universe, of course, but by and large, devices everywhere were designed so that their function would be somewhat discernible by intuition, if not necessary human or Time Lord intuition. In the specific case of _Fabronian_ intuition, though, there was no reason to expect that its makeup would be very much different from that of most other humanoids, if perhaps with a little less caution.

Which was a complicated way to say that the Doctor chose to follow one of the circuit line paths on the floor until further notice.

Then, of course, he saw it, embedded, no, engraved in one of the walls, insofar that the shifting lines could be said to do that.

He saw it, and immediately upon seeing it, had the impression of having seen it somewhere before, sometime long, long ago, longer than he could say or affix with a clear number of linear years, torn free from all of its context, a stone plate catching dust in a museum's extensive collection, displaying the emblem of an egg.

He knew it's meaning of course, he'd encountered the idea behind it and variations of the symbol all over the last few days, and indeed, he'd encountered it before, on his previous visits to the Galaxy, but the connection to that previous, faraway sight occurred to him only now that he was seeing in portrayed in this characteristic, hard edged, blocky art style as opposed to the more fluid styles of later generations.

There was, of course, a possible conclusion to this, a rather easy explanation, and if that were true, it might mean that the ancient Fabronians had gone way further than even their descendants knew about – that, or the stone tablet he'd seen must have had quite the extensive history behind it.

He couldn't quite say where he'd seen it, just that he distinctly recalled the familiar atmosphere of a museum, the distinctive smell of dust and knowledge, and the blurry outlines of other exhibits at the edges of his vision.

Perhaps it had been during his first visit to the the Under-Gallery, where the image had briefly captivated the flow of his bitter musings as he'd stood in a corner, distantly aware of his so-called older selves squabbling with each other while Clara, still a stranger and yet _never_ without a glow of familiarity, was trying to get them to focus;

Or, it had been much earlier (later?), the vaguely-remember group of people being comprised of the Ponds, whose questions he could not recall because his attention had been captivated by the sight of their daughter, curly mane tied back, her dust-covered skin glistening with sweat in the desert sun as the worked to expose the stone tablet with a brush, the scene moving him strangely, not because he ever cared too much for the craft of archeology but for a variety of other reasons – Perhaps it was River herself, looking focused and concentrated as she worked, dedicated and passionate about a profession that was once just a means to track him down, a stark contrast from the rowdy younger version he's stumbled across all too recently, or it might have been her mention of getting the tabled to a museum once she was done with both its excavation and the neutralization of the local trouble, the familiar mental image of dust and museums that this covered up, the distinct mental image of what the apparent stone tabled might look like when it got there, himself too busy making excited observations on that thought to catch much of River's at the time somewhat uninteresting-seeming explanations as to why it was not actually a stone tablet.

 

Though, now that he came to think about it, he may have been confusing something, not just the time, the setting, but the archeologist; There may have been an actual museum, rather than just the story of one. It could have been any museum, any single ones among the many, many he'd come across in his travels, or it could have been a particular one; It could be destined to find its way to his far future self at the national gallery, or perhaps he had seen it at the Braxiatel Collection, in the possession of _another_ Lungbarrow brother, but even there, he couldn't be sure –

Had it been long after his departure, the impatient young person in the background being Ace rather than Amy, and the archeologist who was talking about the hoops she jumped through to obtain it Bernice rather than River?

Had his older brother been standing there with his short dark hair swept back and his half-moon glasses, in what he'd at the time perceived as an impudent yet distinctly more refined knockoff of his own outfit, making a sarcastic quip about his lack of attention, or had Irving been standing there in fine red-and-orange robes and an ornate collar piece, his shoulder-length, mouse-brown hair interspersed with streaks of grey, directing his curt observation instead at his nieces and nephews that had come here to visit, the wife he wasn't quite giving his full attention being not River, but the President's Daughter, though her father had no longer been in office at the time, both of them having been here in order for their children to spend some time with their uncle?

Whenever it had been, it was far too long ago –

These impressions could all be true, or their could all be false. They could all contain different stone tablets, or just this one, which may or may not have been the same one in front of him right now;

Perhaps, there had never been such a tablet at all, and he was only confusing it with a vaguely similar one, or experiencing a sudden sense of deja vu, or some other lapse of attention induced by lack of sleep and just generally spending too much time in a catacomb under a ruin in a desert, no wonder he was having visions of archeologists –

Still, the common denominators in all those half-remembered scraps of memory were, one: that he'd seen it before, associated with a strong mental image of a museum, and two: that he'd been inexplicably captivated by it at the time.

It was, perhaps, the kind of thing that was _intended_ to and carefully crafted to do so captivate, a symbol, a representation supposed to convey a complicated message with but a glance;

– At first, it was merely the surreal yet archetypical nature of the image that had stood out at him, be it right now, or sometime in the past, but these days, he knew it to be a symbol central to Fabronian Culture, meant to depict an idea at a glance, but hold so much more for anyone privy to further knowledge, an encapsulation of a philosophical, transcendental concept, the archetype of the “world-egg” embodying the contrast and connection between macrocosm and the microcosms, but also, the vast world contained in us all, the way people, cities, ideas and everything could be so much 'bigger on the inside', as an acquaintance of his had once put it, smaller worlds within larger worlds like islands in the sea, in image that played a central role in many of the world's religions but held significance far beyond the reach of the superstitions themselves, and in addition to that, it doubled as the city emblem of Xalax, its 'crest' if you will, its symbol unfailingly incorporated in each and every of its official logos by its various governments over time, and like with the city of Athens and the goddess Athena, no one knew which of these had existed first and then inspired the naming of the city.

– in this iteration, right here before him and possibly in his past, the art style reminded him vaguely of the Nazca Lines in its use of rectangular elements, some of its meanders perhaps comparable to Greek keys, an instance of the Second Period of Florescence imitating the first in order to connect to its legacy, but very much doing its own interpretation thereof, like the once garishly colored temples of Earth's antique period becoming immortalized in its blanched out, serene reproductions in the renaissance.

He knew that there were other iterations of it, from abstract, emblematic depictions reduced to a mere swirl of lines, two curved, three-pronged forks one of which was contained within a circle or oval, to elaborate, hyper-realistic grotesque depictions of half-formed embryos or, in older art, unscientific interpretations of what the Fabronians had imagined them as; At its heart, the basic shape was that of a grand tree, embedded in the ground by great roots, nourishing in its branches an egg, or bubble, or some other container of primordial waters that was usually drawn translucent, showing the embryo of a large, winged creature developing within – It was not exactly a 'bird', for example, upon closer look, it had a long, tooth-filled jaw rather than a beak, but it conformed to similar archetypes and associations about freedom and mastery, and through convergent evolution, _resembled_ a bird the way a cactus resembled a spurge, the way scale trees, great ferns, conifers and the leafy trees of flowering plants had independently arrived at the same build, or, like how humans, Time Lords and Fabronians could be said to be alike.

There were versions of it in which the embryo of the developing animal was substituted for that of a humanoid Fabronian with or without stylized wings; There were also some in which the egg was shown to contain a depiction of the cosmos as either a starry dark sphere or a composition of miscellaneous drawings of everything contained therein, or versions in which it was the planet of Fabron itself, its older iterations symbolizing much the same as the 'star-sprangled cosmos' version did but acquiring a more patriotic bent in modern days, especially once visitors from beyond the Galaxy started arriving in droves.

The Symbol had its own name, a very specific, archaic term that had been used only in this particular context for an overwhelming majority of its history, but etymologically denoted the 'containment of infinite variations', giving the image yet more ubiquitous connotations.

The Tardis rendered the term one way, he'd personable render it in another, slightly tweaked one, and on his first visit to Fabron, he'd come to learn that the early human colonists had picked it up and mythologized it in their own way, inspiring some jokes comparing it to the all-seeing eye, the pentagram or even the IDIC (at this point, the original Star Trek was considered a classic akin to Homer, and, indeed not considered that far apart from him from the perspective of a time in which humans had been a space-faring species for ages), but also leading to the iconic, if a bit liberal idiomatric translation as the _'Nautilus Fantasia'_ , (the first part referring to the 'enclosure' of a seashell in the expanse of the ocean, or the 'isolation' of a certain fictional submarine) popularized by a rather introverted author of at least partially human descent, who saw in it a metaphor for the seemingly impenetrable barrier between the inner world and the external, the paradox of a scholar exploring an immense vastness from the enclosure of one's private little, silent refuge, the indirect, abstract understanding of books and telescopes, the explosion of creativity contained within a tiny, finite, isolated mind and ultimately bound by its confined, seeing their ivory Rapunzel Tower in the stem of the tree, its branches as everything that contained their squishy, wobbly, watery Jell-O of the brain, lumping together their room and computer systems with the majority of their own body.

– and though he was much more of an in-the-thick, firsthand pioneer-explorer and had hardly ever lived up to his own pretense of seclusion, he thought he could somewhat relate the concept, spending his days cruising the endless oddities of the infinite dark in his little time machine, his personal little world seldom comprising more than a handful of friends and loved ones at a time, his little blue ship with palace-like comforts inside: It might as well be the TARDIS held within that world-tree's branches.

The same comparison , of course, could, and often _had_ been made for the city of Xalax, at least, since its subterranean chambers had come to resemble the shell of an egg, or at least that's how it was commonly told – the comparision actually dated back to the period in which what were now the lower rings of Xalax had acquired a large dome, and was in fact, an adapted version of the religious legend according to which all life originated in a goddess' tomb below the city, the creator's coffin being 'reborn' as a cosmic egg.

Obviously, even that version had to be a modernization, for, how would their early, primitive ancestors even _know_ about the caves, let alone life in the rest of the universe, when they first cooked up their religion?

Religions everywhere had diminished, but rarely ever quite disappeared with the advent of progress, instead always giving rise to never, improved versions to reflect the believers' increase in understanding and ethics, though of course, they would then turn around and claim that they'd _always_ believed the newer version and that only a fool would 'take it literally', as they still took their legacy and justification from connecting to the past. It was the mind of the believer that gave rise to the god in order to satisfy them, so, if the believer suddenly learned that there was a void up in the sky rather than a marble castle with pearly gates, the deity would be banished to a 'different dimension' and this move then lauded as a form of higher understanding – and once other dimensions became a widely understood quantity in their society, their majesties the gods had to pack up and move once again.

 

Perhaps, the Xalaxians' faraway ancestors had, at first, thought that their goddess' grave was all the way down at the bottom of the lagoon, and that, in the beginning, the sepulchral chamber had cracked open like a literal egg to release all manner of creatures, the creation responsible for her lethal state of exhaustion being that of all the plants and mushrooms all over the globe.

When they understood that life did not simply spring from dirt and could not just have walked from here to other worlds, they had been inspired to come up with a grander story, especially once they'd first pierced its bottom with the stilts of their buildings.

It was even possible that the symbol the legend had originated in different local mythologies that had then gone on to mix once Xalax first became a trading hub all the way back in the ancient past – though both the symbol and the legend involved the basic motif of life springing from an enclose, the tree and the bird so prominent in the symbol were nowhere to be found in what had at the time just been the origin story of a small, tribal religion, one out of many others that had _not_ gone on to be popularized and spread around by a massive sprawling empire, or become associated with what was to become its capital.

 

But whatever its history, in the end, it was just an arrangement of lines, a simplistic picture – A symbol became a symbol because people used it as such, it's power was all in its connotations, its associations, in the minds that listened to its call – And the Doctor's mind _had_ listened, after all, the only reason he'd come here was to experience an afterglow of Fabronian Society.

So as he had been pondering all this, his steps had drawn closer to the reflective surface and the various shifting, glittering line patterns around the symbol itself, which remained constant.

He faintly recalled Benny... or was it River? ...explaining how it wasn't an actual pictogram, and having seen how all the other images around it had shifted, he would probably concur that the pattern hadn't been engraved into the material; Instead, the substance that coated the walls must have somehow been induced to chance state and form the actual grooves and lines in the surface, that still seemed pretty hard and flexible despite its malleable state.

 

Curious, the Doctor extended his hands, bringing the long fingers to the smooth and surprisingly warm surface, right on top the image of the bird.

No sooner than his fingertips has come to rest, he pulled them away in a quick act of instinct when he felt a kind of ripple moving through the surface, some semblance of activity in what had otherwise felt solid and crystalline.

Much like the opening walls from before, the parts he had touched lit up and then began to recede, ostensibly flowing outward until something like a door arch had been created. Meanwhile, the bits he was standing on in the flooring also moved, sliding him forward like a conveyor belt as he gawked, somewhat flabbergasted.

“So this is the same material that's used in the opening walls!”

He remarked, hardly reacting to the entrance melting shut behind him.

His new location revealed itself as a small, pill-shaped capsule when the circuit-line pictograms on its cylindrical walls came alive with light, continuing to illuminate them as they went through yet another transformation, a frighteningly thin layer of them detaching from the rest to form a translucent, glass like layer. The floor, too, turned transparent, except that in its case, there was nothing beneath.

“That's one truly impressive metamaterial!”

The reason he hadn't panicked was, of course, that he'd already worked out that he was in yet another elevator, or at least, that's what he would have told Clara if she had been here.

Then of course, the ride began, and the entire capsule began a swift downward race against the dark shaft it had just detached from, faster than he might have been able to appreciate if he didn't have additional senses that could measure his motion against space, and how much ground he was covering.

Combined with the symbol, there was really only one place this could be going: The Old Town, the Lower City, the historic dome itself.

He half expected the kind of spiking music and dramatic pan out that horror movies would accompany sudden trap doors with, but before such a sound would even have stopped playing, the motion stopped – With these distances, it was barely slower than a teleport, and the ride had been smooth, too – He'd bet his sonic screwdriver that there must have been some inertial dampening to avoid an uncomfortable collision with the ceiling.

Right in his line of sight, a dot of light appeared, heralding another 'opening wall' as the other walls simultaneously turned back to being opaque.

The Doctor was already pretty familiar with these at this point – the truly surprising thing was the soft golden radiance that fell into the hallway from behind that doorway.

You'd think that any abrupt encounter with any daylight-like illuminations would have been traumatic, but the engineers had evidently taken this into account, providing soft, red-and-golden illumination that roughly resembled, but by no means _mimicked_ the sky outside.

The Fabronians were pragmatic about their bodies' positive responses to light, but they did not _bow_ to them and might well have outdone their sun in its suitability for their kind – There would be no heat strokes or sunburns in here, nor was there any risk of incurring skin cancer.

 

Stepping out of the cabin, the Doctor took in the scenery before him, and allowed himself to be awed by it, forcing his ever-buzzing mind to quiet down and take a nice, long look at the sights before him. He was near the outskirts of where the dome was, close enough to its outer walls to see colossal tunnel entrances in its side walls that had once been gates to the outside or perhaps, to surface outskirts of the city.

The sheer size of them really could not been understated, each of them a monument to the city's wealth, history and culture, but also, it's bloody past. They each had their own name, taken from the architect who'd been assigned to design them when they were first built. The statues and ornaments that surrounded each of them was somewhat different from the others, though they all bore the lavish, jewel-encrusted style typical of their time period.

The ring gates, collectively called such because they lined the outermost 'ring' of the Old Town, were a display of not just beauty, but also functionality: They had been built so that they could slam shut in case of an invasion, and keep the domed structure stable and sealed even if it were flung into space or, as it had eventually happened, sank into the molten ground.

Later, after the ground rock had long since solidified, they had been opened again to continue building beyond them, leading to the creation of smaller city districts, each radiating out at an angle, named after the gate from which it could be accessed, the style of each subtly influenced by the art style of the gate it had sprung from, but overall closer to the lower middle city than the inside of the dome, being much, much younger – reflected in them was the pride of a young generation recovered from years of hiding and cowering in the forgotten, submerged dome, quite glad to have this hidden world to themselves.

Somehow people tended to have this idea that if they could only go live in a place with people just like themselves, all of their problems would be gone and they wouldn't have to deal with all the troubles brought on by individual difference. The Doctor thought it to be one of the more harmful delusions that sentient beings had ever devised – what actually tended to happen was that one came to realize that having a few traits in common did not make them exactly the same person.

Before long, Thought Policing and No True Scotsman fallacies would be thrown around before eventually, people grew up and accepted that they were different, or flipped into full us vs. them mode, and one way or another, society continued like it always did.

But at first, these young Xalaxians had really believe that they could create an ideal society without strife now that they were all among themselves and, despite their pride and a certain callousness toward the tragedy and destruction that had made their lives as they were, had made an admirable attempt at doing so and making the most out of their secluded freedom in which they were not beholden to anyone, and their fearlessly modern architecture and social reforms had reflected that.

By the time they started building _upwards,_ they had returned to a more pragmatic style, perhaps in awareness that they might well be judged for the deeds of their distant ancestors and humbled by the fact that they did not at all know how the world might have changed and advanced in all the time they were hidden away, advancement being rather crucial to Xalaxian identity and hence, exactly the sort of thing they'd be collectively insecure about.

Continuing from the top of the dome, the central city had been built all the way to the peaks of the surface towers and by then, they were back to bragging with a few reservations that had simply been absorbed into tradition by then, like those reservations of depicting their own form, but since Fabronian generations tended to last a lot longer than human ones and the generally larger age gaps and persistence of firsthand memory led to each of these periods lasting fairly long, enough for many layers of ingenuous architecture to pile up in all directions, often making use of clever engineering tricks to realize the enormous dimensions in accordance with the laws of physics.

 

Facing away from the gates, however, lay the expanse of the Old Town, the Lower City, the true Heartland of the Xalaxian Empire.

To its citizens, it had been tantamount the cradle of civilization, the egg of the world – but even without adhering to such legends or delusions, the sight before him was dazzling, even to him – it was worth stating that he deliberately allowed himself to get lost in the impression, and could have chosen not to, but – it would have been fundamentally incorrect to liken the dome to any kind of regular natural cave or your regular colossal building.

Even in his 'line of work', structures of this size were an exceptional style – It was tall enough to form a horizon line, tall enough for _skyscrapers_ to stand in from both directions and still have a plenitude of space left in the middle, though only the central part of the upper part actually did, reflective monoliths hanging down in the red and golden shine.

The dome itself was not actually a perfect hemisphere, but more of a wider, flattened, lens-like form, and the top would have done next to nothing if the lower half had not been embedded in a solid structure as well – Though it had never actually flown, all of the lower city was technically an enormous flying saucer, long since embedded into and connected with the adjacent compounds.

The top half of the dome was inhabited, too, and resembled a dark, glittering cityscape, star-like windows covering various tenebrous outlines, distinctly urban and thoroughly modern in nature, the kind of buildings a space-faring civilization would erect, but with the lower city, the Xalaxians had attempted to imitate their ancestors, or much rather, their own fantasies and interpretations of them, and realized the mythical land of their dreams.

The lift the Doctor had taken had brought him to the outer rim of the dome, and from here, he could overlook all of it, complete with the broad, ring-like structures inspired by the city's first iterations.

Unlike then, the lower half of the city somewhat curved downwards, with the temples, palaces, public pleasure gardens and government buildings in its center forming its lowest point, which made it easy to overlook from around the ring gates.

Down here, he finally saw what the Xalaxians had done with the water of the Lagoons: For one thing, it filled the concentric canals of varying thickness that divided the city into it's ring-like divisions, but even if you put that aside, it was ubiquitous: In between the gates, little waterfalls poured out of the walls; A plethora of fountains and aqueducts crisscrossed the multitude of reflective splendor that surrounded him, from the irrigation of pleasure Gardens to tiny decorative water clocks, the glittering deep-spring waters fed and animates everything, and through a technological burst of vanity, nearly all water within the city was kept clean and potable, except, presumably, the sewers.

Despite the old-timesy designs of columns and arches and carvings, the Fabronians could not help but show off their mastery of material sciences, creating both incredibly flimsy-looking, dreamlike buildings that seemed to defy gravity, and encrusting many a surface with artificial jewels that they could then synthesize en masse without any need to bother with the troublesome work of digging them out of the ground: The scarcities and limitations of nature were not the boss of them.

Even here, on the very edge on an area that, by itself, must have dwarfed most 21st century human cities, every building was a product of deliberate creation, intricate and loving individual works of art; Many of these had been private residences or the shops and facilities needed to provide such residential districts with all manner of luxuries, and as such, they were the works of a multitude of architects, much less unified than the pompous structures closer to the center; Wherever he could see, there were compositions of shapes, diverse forests of gold and marble, some of the buildings heavy and mighty, others elegant and filigrane, each of them easily a castle by itself or a light miniature of similar dignity, not necessarily big in size but certainly magnificent in sophistication; But if one were forced to name a common denominator, one could easily arrive at 'rococo' or 'baroque'; The symphony of distinct styles collectively had its frills and florishes cranked up to the max.

There were always more details left to discover, more intricacies left to please eager eyes and receptive minds; Stepping into the Lower City was like walking into a painting or experiencing the visual equivalent of an orchestra, a blossom of detail and arrangement unified by a common harmony that melted into a stunning whole.

Even the Doctor, who far more of a meaningfully framework to compare it to than most individual would have had, found himself at a loss to describe the splendor before her.

He'd thought that he would be making sarcastic quips when he got here, poking fun at the ostentatious luxury he expected to find, but here before him was _beauty_ , however it may or may not have come to be, and jaded as he was, even he wasn't the kind of dead, desiccated being that would spit on it.

One might say that the splendor before him had been the product of vanity and pride, but honestly, there was no reason that the Fabronians couldn't have made all this and then desisted from blowing each other up – Indeed, one wondered why they would ever risk destroying their civilization if it could birth such marvelous wonders, just looking at this place should have made them want to throw down their weapons and share in its beauty, but, those darned ingrates had to take it for granted, didn't they?

Gold and glitter may be lies, but there was no arguing with the simple, sincere pleasantness of shapes and colors and the ineffable positive qualia contained therein; Some things just felt pleasant to look at just like there were things that sounded, smelt and tasted good; If it were otherwise, the whole vast field of purely abstract art couldn't exist.

'Pleasant', however, was an incredible understatement in this case, it was like comparing some vaguely nice ambient music to a live performance that brought tears to one's eyes; What these houses and streets evoked was a sense of euphoria and bliss, a flash of marvel comparable to the sort that could be chemically induced, but experienced with the full, conscious clear-headedness of the sober mind, with a full and intact sense of reality, insofar as it could be maintained alongside the heady feeling evoked by the sights before him, a city like a painting, or a whole museum made out of paintings, an artificial dreamland made all the more unearthly by the absence of its makers – far and wide, there was only beauty, stillness, and running water, its sloshing the only sound that permeated this womb-like expanse of red and gold, practically a world of its own, enclosed, lost and hidden away to all... well, except for him.

This world is full of wonders.

 

Once again of just _why_ he'd chosen this life of travel and discovery, of why he'd chosen it over any other path when given the choice again and again.

His earlier tension and suspicion melted away from him, and he allowed himself to just exist in the moment, from one impression to the next, spinning around the sunken city in a giddy haze; Even the streets on these outskirts were wide, each side decorated with little streams of water and even trees that had somehow been kept in shape throughout the years, likely by gardening robots who had labored away for centuries even in absence of their masters.

The machines may even have kept replacing them – after all, even trees do not live forever, and the potted flowers surely didn't; Though they may have been genetically altered to bloom all-year round, their natural forms ought to have been of the sort whose life cycled spanned only a single year. Even if the Fabronians left a large stockpile of flower seeds for their robot gardeners to tend, what were the odds of the supply lasting to this day?

He supposed that this, too, could be attributed to those mystery stowaways, but he thought this in jest, no longer allotting that theory much credibility.

 

 


	9. Day 9

 

Day 9

 

Among the city's most famous sights – that is, famous and gorgeous even by its extraordinary standards – was the theater house contained in one of the central town's foremost pleasure gardens.

Indeed, the garden itself was only slightly behind in renown and splendor, being historically known as the aristocrat's park thought it had been open to the citizens for most of said history – the eponymous aristocrats had, in actuality, been its _sponsors_ and taken great pride in outdoing each other with lavish grants to the public, reserving for themselves only the right to access the installation's most exclusive services and finest facilities whenever they so pleased, though even the gaudiest luxuries were so ample in their availability that they could accommodate them without causing a big dent – if anything, they were offering the most distinguished citizens easy access to themselves.

 

The park itself was a dreamscape of arches, columns, fountain-studded waterways and fragrant plans, without doubt carefully planned, yet appearing to flow almost naturally, a highly man-made paradise inviting you to casually find its many pleasures as you would fruit in an orchard, and indeed, fruit trees and vines were a common feature, as were stylized wells – the classical-looking buildings were half-hidden among the plants, yet both structures and greenery were so placed so that they offered relative privacy, and as any kind of rain or harsh weather was not an issue under the enormous dome, delicate facilities could be placed in the open air.

Hidden on the grounds like secret gardens, yet placed so that visitors would be subtly guided towards them, one could find all manner of leisure facilities, from a library to a gymnasium, vast baths, what one might call a spa and various services related to health, fitness and beauty, all the way to vast zoological and botanical collections, museums, art galleries, exhibition houses and an amphitheater for miscellaneous shows and speeches, opportunities to engage in various sports and games and free high-end banquets – only in a decadent post scarcity economy would you find such a thing as a free lunch. There was even a forum for public discussion and debate, as well as some parts of the gardens reserved for festivalsor poetic expression, and others yet intended to house orgies and prostitution – though the design of the place was such that even at the height of its activity, it would never have seemed too busy or packed, and rather more like the golden age of legend, when no man had to labor and the gods mingled freely with the mortals, and idyllic setting out of fantasy and myth.

Every way one looked, there were lavish plants, artistic little waterways and boastful statues; Few buildings were higher than three stories. It was an environment from a dream, designed to make you get lost in it, a vast garden to play and entertain yourself with without end, especially down here, where no changes of the light or the weather could remind you of the passage of time – but it was never intended to be wholly silent, like it was now – there ought to have been, at least, the distant sound of music, birdsong and laughter, and perhaps then, the place would have lost some of its dreamlike quality, or maybe it would be the people themselves who'd take on mythical, otherworldly attributes, their pride and wrath suddenly put into jarring perspective once one considered that this was their normal-

Wandering under marble arches, amid columns and platforms, waterways and fruit trees, hung with jewelry and flowing robes as it was their custom, amply augmented and decorated like Christmas trees, the Fabronians themselves may have been easily mistaken for the giants, nymphs and demigods they had confused themselves with, children of this artificial paradise where everything was fashioned to their liking, needing merely to reach out their arms to command the machines to service them, or, simply, to reach for the ripe fruit that hung from the branches and vines that had been conveniently placed near the walkways, so innocuously and playfully scattered as to appear natural, but unmistakably recognizable as managed upon closer glance: The different kinds of fruits were all ripe at the same time, and all of them perfectly formed, there wasn't a single one that was overripe or compromised by parasites, and they felt firm, but not hard to the touch, flawless in color and smell.

The Doctor reached out for one small, orange orb as it still hung on the vine, and scanned in more for interest in its alterations and bioengineering than for safety concerns, though the results quickly persuaded him to let it be and perhaps pick another plant to 'patronize' – Not that didn't contain an admirable about of vitamins and electrolytes, but while a lot of those fruit-bearing plants had indeed been placed here to offer convenient juicy snacks, the scan revealed that this particular one was here to serve a different purpose, as its fruits contained significant amounts of substances with hallucinogenic and entactogenic properties, at least, to the Fabronians – but Time Lords, and, indeed, humans, were close enough in their biochemistry that he preferred not to risk it; He was already seeing things, and the last things his idle thoughts needed at the moment was chemical encouragements.

The discovery did, at least, further illustrate the kind of debauchery must have gone on here, and, indeed, put certain design properties in the buildings and plant arrangements into perspective; It was easy to supplement his vague, eyes-rolling imagination of the jewelry-hung, half-naked Fabronians with a few distinctly inebriated individuals; His mental picture of the kaleidoscope of dream-like paradise and infernal decadence beginning to resemble a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

In a sober state, he was probably missing a third of the typical experience, or two thirds without the people themselves, as there was no service personnel to serve banquets or hand out massages, or, indeed, 'massages', nor were there other patrons with whom to debate politics, discuss art or to hug in a drug-addled rush.

With the sober mind of a later historian, the abandoned garden seemed much like an exhibit in a museum, imbued with a serenity that the real place may never have possessed – at the very least, there must have been the occasional arguing couple or overly inebriated, nauseated fellow, and others such distinctly un-glamorous consequences of this being a real place that was used;

One need to merely apply logic to conclude that it was likely a popular tourist designation, with all the dreadful realities that implied.

Anything could become “just stuff” if you stared at it long enough, even this fallen city, and even the most famed of its jewels.

That, of course, was not a viewpoint conductive to enjoying it, so the Doctor chose not to dwell on that point of view for too long, instead continuing on his path toward what was considered the Pearl of the aristocrat's garden: The central theater house, a circular building of white marble with a white dome, its outline circles with closely places white columns, beyond which the actual gate waited, several stories high, with lavish metal decorations, the central lock being shaped as a relief statue of a feminine deity peeking out from the wall; The door alone stood higher than any other structure within the park.

There were actually several stage rooms inside, as well as a large foyer with an enormous chandellier at its center, all of them lavish, though varying in style and relative modernity – at the height, there would have been several stage plays a day, sometimes even concerts or dance acts, with artists from all over the magecity and beyond coming to perform here.

As one of the most prestigious theaters in Xalax, the aristocrat's park theater could never pledge itself to one particular art style or tradition of performance, allowing the visitors at its height to witness something different every day, from all historical periods and art styles of this world, even some alien plays picked up during the Fabronian's more expansive spacefaring periods, everything from highly sophisticated performances in gandiose period costume and highly artificial language to lowkey improvisational pieces with minimal requisites.

The same eclecticism was incorporated into the seven stages in total that were incorporated into the building, two on top of each other in the east and west, two in the north, one underground and another right beneath the dome, utilizing almost its full volume for dramatic effects surrounding the seats at its center, and the large, southern opera hall that was the largest and most splendorous of them all, framed by many stories of VIP boxes including several “throne loges” for the I-est of VIPs.

Despite its name, it weren't just Operas being performed there but the full, sophisticated Orhestra is incorporated was almost always a central feature of the performances it hosted.

Each of the rooms was designed in a different style, with different perks and attributes – though all of them were lavish and impressive, their styles varied, so that stepping into each of them was akin to stepping into a different world, or perhaps, another subset or part of a person's mind, inhabited by a different emotion... but for the largest, most stunning room, the architects had decided to go with a classic, timeless look, or what passed for such in Xalax: One did not have to see it to be certain that it would be gaudy as hell, a hell of vermillion curtains, golden curtains and intricate fractal patterns of opaque jewel plating the floor.

To express it in Earth Terms, one could say that it was Dresden's Semperoper times one-hundred, except with much more stained-glass window-like patterning on the walls, golden metal where of-white paint would have sufficed and a few mythology-themed paintings near the room, all in colors dark enough not to be too distracting when the lights were dimmed for attention to focus on the stage – even the lowest seats were luxurious.

But even in this blindingly coruscation utopia, it still took weeks or months for a theater group to practice and perfect a play, and for the jewel of the holy city, the selection was only discerning, the incentive to polish and perfect even greater – even here, a 24 hour program was just not possible, but for the Xalaxians, that would not do – so, the very best performances of each season were put up for the vote, and the most popular of them captured with a holoprojector, so that at any given time, at least one stage that wasn't currently being used for practice would have something on display – the visitors, especially frequent ones, were even encouraged to vote on which plays to record and which holographic recordings to play, and since the system had been in place for many, many years, there was a large repertoire of performances to pick from, or for the theater staff to screen as part of themed exhibits – at the touch of a button, the likenesses of long dead actors and actresses could be summoned forth to relive the performance that immortalized them, some of them so old that even the long-lived Fabronians had considered them ancient masterpieces by the time the city was abandoned –

It was part of what made the aristoctat's park theater so famed and so intrinsically connected with a sense of awe and legacy, a legacy to which new pieces had been added until the city's abandonment. There had, of course, been debates about people's likenesses, given the later attitudes toward personal depictions, but the general consensus was that these moving snapshots of other times were too valuable to destroy, the tradition to revered to be discontinued, and besides, quite different from a static image or even the statues whose continued existence was tolerated – one was looking not so much at actors, but the fictional characters and universal concepts they had chosen to lend their forms to, every detail so easy to miss if one didn't pay attention.

An attraction like that was, of course, impossible for the Doctor to pass up, so from the moment he reached the lower city, it was unavoidable that he should find his way to the largest of those stages, in one of the lower seats, transfixed on the holographic ghosts of the distant past.

He'd opened up one of VIP boxes, though he could not stand to stay here with all the ostentatious bling and oversized rubies embedded in the columns, but when he left for the lower seats, he'd taken a souvenir, a little something the theater offered to its most prestigious guests, because they could not be expected to bring their own & carry annoying baggage all this way, nor to do without, a gesture intended, with some quite apparent symbolism, to tell them to feel as much at ease as they would in their own homes – It was, he supposed, a garment, comparable to being issued a borrowed bathrobe in a sauna club, though he'd joke that it was the Fabronian answer to a 'human burrito', if there had been anyone here to hear that remark.

At the most basic level it was a piece of expensive cloth, a thin blanket or loose wrapping to be worn indoors, and, indeed, was commonly left on the local equivalent to coat racks while their owners substituted them for their outdoor cloaks (which, for the dweller of a subteranean city, or the later biodomes, was a mostly decorative article) – you'd wear it for comfort and to keep your limbs warmed while you were seated, and would transport it wrapped around your body while changing locations, held in place with a brooch or just by pinning the folds between your upper arm and torso – the one he'd snatched was off a smooth, glittery navy blue fabric, with silver embroidery depicting an annotated map of the night sky, and it served him well enough in adding a little more of an authentic touch as he watched the performances of centuries past, the impassioned speeches and sung laments of the lost city's former masters.

 

It did, however, proceed to stab him in the back by being a little bit _too_ comfy, allowing the last few days' sustained wakefulness to finally catch up to him during a centuries' old musical performance he was rather enjoying before he nodded off.

He didn't recall much of what he'd dreamed, but he knew for certain that there had been water, glittering, moving slowly but steadily, spreading from all the artificial creeks, flowing into the ridges in the relief that formed the jewel pavement, flooding the ancient streets and falling off the aqueducts in sheets.

When he woke, there was a glittering, too, but not of water, hanging diffusely into his field of vision, and escaping its view because his eyes could focus on it.

Immediately, he was alert, rushing to his feet before his mind had even fully been roused from its sleep, carelessly dropping the cloth to the floor and contending with a split-second struggle to stay on his feet and refrain from unbalancing himself with a half-baked conscious thought while his instincts were already leading his ganze and posture to dart in the direction of that unclear stimulus.

He thought he may have heard steps and perhaps the rustle of hair and clothing, but by the time he had clearly surveillance the room, there was no motion anywhere, especially not anywhere close by on the lowest floor.

Even on the stage, the recording had ended, and the afterimages of long gone actors remained frozen in their last bow, standing side by side in a line.

He couldn't say why he didn't pull out his sonic screwdriver and scan right away, perhaps because such sophisticated concerns were far from the reptilian rush of survival instincts that had driven his initial actions – by the time he thought to scan the perimeter, there was noting left to be found, and perhaps, there had never been, granted, his reaction had not been as fast and effective as it would have been if he hadn't been asleep, he was much too seasoned a vagrant and, indeed, a technician to make such a mistake while fully aware – he may just have missed a very critical time window.

If some kind of cloaking or concealment technology was being used here, there was a much lower chance of it working interference-free in close quarters, but this city was gigantic, and being somewhere else than where he was should not be the slightest problem, that was probably why whoever it was hadn't bothered to confront him.

Then again, those same facts would pose the question as to why they'd go near him in the first place, if they had managed to hide from him their technology should not be much less sophisticated than his own, at least as far as sensor equipment went, and their visits to the central maintenance system would suggest that they surveiled the place, perhaps contributing to its ongoing peak condition – would they risk such a vulnerable, hidden-away position just for curiosity?

Perhaps, if they were as interested in him as he was in them.

There was, of course, also the possibility that there _was_ no them, and that anything he'd thought to have glimpsed was just a trick of the light, a minor mistake or misconception brought on by his overactive mind.

This was precisely what he disliked about sleeping, there was never a way to know.

At least, he was properly rested now, there'd be no more of that inconvenience for a _while._

With a sigh, he went back to his seat, but decided to drop the wrapping cloth as soon as he picked it up, throwing it over the seat he'd spent his nap on for no particular reason.

He felt he was done here – though he hadn't spent nearly enough time to fully explore the diversity of an entire culture's artistic outputs, he simply no longer felt like sitting around and decided to keep moving.

He'd already mostly discarded the idea that he'd heard an actual person by the time he passed one of the doors that led out of the large opera hall back into the foyer – so, he was all the more struck when he _noticed_.

It wasn't strictly the first time, he'd been vaguely aware of the little, floral-patterned golden table next to the entrance and the chairs next to it, he'd assumed that it had once served to sell or check tickets or whatever else they did to make sure everyone had paid, or at least that no one got in after the hall was full – he couldn't recall if the second chair had already been across the other, which on its own seemed contrary to the table's purpose, but could have had any number or possible explanations.

The plates and tea set left on the table, however, did not. They and the cutlery around them were every bit as fancy and ostentatious as the architecture around them and may somehow have belonged to the building in case of buffets or to consume snacks being sold here, but they had no business being on this table. And just in case he was still skeptical, _just_ to make sure that he'd notice even if he hadn't paid attention to whether the table had been empty before, the plates contained stray crumb of what may have been bread or cake, and the cups were filled with faint residues of still-hot, steaming tea of a rich, tangy aroma –

Even without knowledge of the cleaning robots that ought to have put it away if it had remained out here for too long, one could not deny that it had been recently touched, indeed, there was some tea left in the pot, which the owners may have meant to consume before they heard him awakening – this setup suggested at least two individuals, but they'd been leisurely, almost playful in dining so close to where he'd slept, he chairs were arranged slightly sideways, he could just imagine them sitting here fully casually, chatting bemusedly about the unexpected presence of this curious extraneous creature – they had not behaved like the cautious guards of a hidden civilization, duty bound to social responsibility and pressured by fear of the discovery that would change their world forever, but more like they'd generally prefer to remain undisturbed, but would have absolutely nothing to lose if he stumbled upon them – they moved through their world with the same post-apocalyptic abandon as he had.

Something about this gave him the strong impression that they must be very few in number, much unlike their ancestors from the Second Apocalypse – He still reserved judgment and in the end, he had no proof for that supposition other than a mere whisper of the mind – years of experience had taught him to neither blindly trust nor fully disregard his intuitions.

They must known that he was here, what more, they must have been well aware that he was alien, with his, to them, foreign clothing and his lack of purple forehead spots – And he would have no luck passing as a human when _homo sapiens_ had yet to reach this galaxy and no one had even _seen_ terran style clothing yet.

 

After a brief period of disbelief, he accepted the evidence, moved on, and allowed it to galvanize into curiosity and determination – the first step he took was to approach the table and sample both the tea (vaguely like a spicy chai but less “milky”) and the breadcrumbs (not cake, but still sweet, like very dark, crumbly bread infused with bits of dried, candied fruit).

They were without a doubt fresh but the pastry was likely mass-produced rather than hand-baked.

With the tea still warm, they could not have gone far – That began his search, he ran multiple automatic scanning programs while at the same time having a physical look around – they could deceive his instruments but if he'd truly seen them just now, they couldn't deceive his eyes, or at least not all the way.

He was looking not so much for the stragglers themselves, as for further signs of their presence – in this large a city, locating a pair of humanoids would be next to impossible.

Still, if he _were_ to be lucky enough to find them, it would probably not be out in the open, but rather 'backstage', where one could actually be expected to hide, somewhere between the changing rooms, the stage technicians' hiding places or wherever they kept the requisites – so that's where he went to look.

There was something surreal yet familiar about a room filled with all manner of random objects with no seeming connection to each other; The connection was even stronger in the costume room, whose ample collection and overall dimensions could contend with his own changing room back in the TARDIS.

There were a variety of costumes from both Fabron's history and the inhabitant’s imagination, and his own fantasies were taking more and more solid shape, picturing the 'residents' fingering through the racks to pick out clothes that had never belonged to them and, at times, been donated to the public, and the personality that must have gone into choosing to take up residence _here_ , in a house of the arts, in what had been a palace of the public where _no_ single person would have been allowed to dwell had the city not been abandoned – It spoke of self-righteous pride, but it also told of a certain sense of poetry, as, he supposed, did everything down here. Having often described the actions of his companions as 'very human', he thought that at this point, he knew enough to describe this choice of as 'Very Fabronian'.

This place was, after all, public property, and if the 'public' consisted of only a few people, it was all theirs to use – that perspective, of course, deliberately overlooked that they were keeping the city's wealth, secrets and comforts all to themselves.

Having already seen the city after its destruction made it easy to forget, but ultimately, he did remember that right now at this point in time, there was still a 'public' out there on the surface, contemporary Fabronians with just as much right to this place as whoever had set up camp down here.

He was sure that whoever lived here were bound to be some very interesting individuals, but he wasn't sure if he would like them, with the entitled, superior way that they were saving up all this material, technological and cultural treasure all for themselves like some super-rich art collectors or old misers... which may be exactly what they were.

Old, that is – With so small a number, so little concern about discovery, such a haughty yet undoubtedly _direct_ connection to the prestige this building once held, everything that made it a prize and not just another big building, there was a good chance that they'd had their lifespans artificially extended... Immortals perhaps. He could see it, picture them seeing themselves as the true heirs to the city, finding it preposterous that some politician could throw them out, and deciding to hide themselves and stay.

Whatever made them immortal might in itself have kept them off the bioscans, or , they simply used old technology. If they _were_ immortal, that opened up the possibility that they still lived after the surface towers had molten down – had they still been here at the time of his last visit, somewhere beneath his feet, still being catered to by the city's machinery like puppeteers in a kingdom made of marionettes?

Perhaps they were.

It would also explain the irregular accessing of the maintenance computers, if it was a handful of individuals deciding to go up there and check according to their needs and whims, rather than a robot or a society where a certain regularity in the duties would be instated to assure that they are taken care of.

He could easily picture all of this as he walked through the ample costume room, noticing how lavish clothing of a certain size had been accumulated on a rack near the door. Really fancy clothes, even by Fabronian standards, the sort fit for a queen of myth – if that queen were a short woman shaped like a cello.

So now he even had an idea of what at least one of them looked like, and how she liked to dress – Her taste was ostentatious and pompous, even for a Fabronian, but it was also more extravagant than 'classic' or 'antique', containing some rather modern outlandish pieces, the sort a fancypants fashion designer would concoct with little expectation than anyone other than his company's models was ever going to wear it.

What his imagination _wouldn't_ have included, however, was the piece that was laid out on a chair next to the lady's apparent personal rack – an Earth Style baroque dress.

Not 'baroque' in an aesthetic, comparative sense, but the exact same cuts that would have been worn in the 17th or 18th century on Earth – he'd been using the adjectives 'baroque' and 'rococo' before because there truly was an amazing parallel development and similarity which perhaps may have made similar Earth clothing appealing to this place's residents, but they should not have known or had any contact with Earth, the match was far too exact to be simple parallelism, and too disparate from purely Fabronian dresses and robes to be merely coincidence.

Even at the height of their empire and spread through their home galaxy, they had _never_ reached the milky way – _never._

And yet, it was an Earth baroque dress, or perhaps a later reproduction inspired by those, a rose-colored mess of expensive, silky cloth and embroiled decorations, with white frills lining the sleeves, shoulders and neckline, silver decorations, corset straps and artificial flowers creating an artful relief that must have been a lot of work to get into – heaven knows he'd never bother with so much flourish if he had a whole city to himself, and he'd often been considered quite a bit of a fashion victim over the years – whoever it was went through all the trouble to wear those sorts of things all for herself and her companion(s) down here.... then again, so did he, in a sense. It was not nearly as inexplicable as where she'd get the Earth clothing.

 

In one adjacent room, once a changing room for actors, he found a bed, a personal, king-sized one with rich velvet curtains and filigree decorations.

There was no need to wonder whether the jewelry on the vanity table or the bed had belonged there once upon a while, or what purpose they may have served in its theater days: The room was very clearly lived in, by someone _other_ than the lady, their choice of clothing scattered across the room with much less loving attention – the second person's clothing was somewhat simple, overall androgynous in style but also indicative of modest height.

There were various tight-fitting overalls and dark-colored robes, including a moss green one much like the one that had been missing from that shopping window. The whole room featured the bed, some cupboards, two luxury sinks and multiple vanity tables some of which were being used as desks or bookshelves, and was rather messy and disorderly, like a teenager's room would be.

There was a personality profile to be filed here, too, they were certainly not of the orderly sort, and somewhat less concerned with aesthetics, at least not all of the time – they seemed to like jewelry, though this may just be common culture on Fabron, however, they'd clearly made the room their own and transformed it from its changing room days, using the clothing hooks to hang baskets to hold their position, the bed, multiple slippers that didn't match in color, and a an extension cable to which they'd connected multiple upper-city style devices including a portable food synthesizer to avoid leaving the room – a shower and water closet was right adjacent to the room itself; Overall, the room had a rather used and improved feel to it despite the luxury furniture and decorations, which, in conjunction with everything else, only served to give the room a dark, heavy cave-like feeling –

After all he'd seen, there could be no more doubt that there were indeed people living here.

 

It was frustrating.

He _knew_ they were down here, yet he also knew that he would most likely never find them.

Two people in an enormous megacity, and they might well be the only ones – needle in a haystack.

He could try, but he'd probably fail to find them, miss all of the city, and provide them with a whole lot of amusement. He'd have a better chance if he went back to the TARDIS to collect supplies, but that would give them time to prepare as well, and going all the way back up seemed like overkill for downright hunting some people who had never done him any harm and might prefer to maintain their privacy – it was not like he couldn't understand them, though he wondered if they didn't get bored all by themselves... then again, if they had the means not to be detected, they might just have the means to leave.

 

A big sigh later, having taken a moment to stew in the nagging curiosity he may not be able to satisfy, he decided to move on and let the disorderly fellow back into their room.

He would just continue his exploration of the city, and if he met them, it'd be fine, and if he didn't, it would be fine, too, and he'd at least confirmed their existence.

It irked his competitive spirit that they might have gotten their eyes on him when he hadn't, but in the end, this was their home turf and it had likely been that for a very long time, so it's not like the game had been fair to begin with – His best hope was that they'd tried to observe him before or at least didn't seem too perturbed by his presence, so they might come near him again, and until they did, he might as well enjoy the rest of the city without wasting his time and energy looking for these elusive Phantoms of the Opera.

 

So, he departed.

He did not find the immortals.

What he _did_ find, however, was a secret pathway in the crypt of the central temple, not find as in 'discover', but truly, simply 'find', as in, it was already gaping wide open though it possessed a sophisticated locking mechanism, not that he couldn't have detected or opened it, but, the very fact that it stood open like that suggested that it saw frequent enough use to make the opening of the door mechanism a bit of a hassle.

The crypt, like the rest of the temple, was built in a geometric, semi-cubist style that he'd personally compare to a 'castle' build with colorful building blocks for children or neon tiles in a glass floor, the saturated colors of the individual blocks providing a surreal sight – the tunnel itself, however, was of distinctly different make, older perhaps, or younger, in contrasting crystalline blues with pictogram-lines that seemed etched in but were probably a kind of metamaterial, a clearer, sparklier one than the one before which looked kind of like massive ice, if it had been stable in the city's agreeable climate.

A broad grin spread across his face, dragging the folds of his skin.

Now if _that_ wasn't some consolation prize.

 


	10. Day 11

Day 11

 

Fascinating.

Very fascinating.

As it would turn out, he'd been completely mistaken – or rather, the contemporary Fabronians had been, regarding their own ancestors. Perhaps the stories had been dismissed as too wild, or there had been misunderstandings, or the wars had really been _that_ devastating; Knowing wars, and knowing what he had just found, he didn't find it difficult to believe, and neither was it hard to see that he had been _wrong._

This civilization had turned out to be much, much more extraordinary than he expected, at least for some definitions thereof –

They _had_ left their galaxy, in their glory days, they had ventured far and wide, to Earth and even beyond, and, they had created miracles, again, for some definition –

The splendor of the city, the fancy decadent pleasures of the eye, _everything_ , except perhaps the sturdy construction of the dome itself... all of that was _worthless_ compared to what he'd found down here, in the caves beneath the temple.

 

What had he found? Well, for one thing there were caves, natural ones at first, at least in part. There was definitely some blueish, whitish chalk like stone reflecting the blue lights from the crystal; The stairs led down the equivalent of several stories in what seemed like a straight path at first but then curved into a cylindrical structure with a spiral staircase inside, going all the way to a chamber, where there were several door-arches leading into the walls, and more stairs – judging by the engravings, they lead to maintenance-related facilities and if the door had been open, the place was probably used and maintained by the elusive residents – it were the stairs that held his attention the most, so he followed them, further and further down, until solid, bluish crystal gave way to glass-like steps with a subtle cellophan-ish rainbow shimmer, leading along the walls with the help of a safety railing. So far, it could be seen as a fancy “sufficiently advanced technology” equivalent of an industrial staircase, the sort that would be a tin ladder or metal scaffolding stairs back on 21st century Earth –

Oh, but when he got _down_.

What he found put the surface to shame in terms of being dreamlike, perhaps because it was distilled and unprofaned by everyday pride, mythical and respected even by the Fabronians themselves, or, perhaps, the difference was apparent only because he was uniquely situated to know what it was, or, at least, to recognize it eventually as his many senses took it in.

What was it, well, it was hard to describe, but it became easier if one merely focused on the visuals as if they were all there was – The walls gave way to a large artificial cavern with clear, temple-like structures visible on the walls, filled with three dimensional structures that resembled antique buildings or scaffolding, a web of columns, walls and platforms connected by stairs with no clear symmetry, just simple forms repeated in endless combinations of infinite potential, like a child's pure, unspoiled imagination constructing nonsensical structures out of a few basic shapes and no imposed function or limitation beyond that.

Everything was engraved with writing and mathematical symbols, a zesty cursive as individual and irregular as handwriting, as if it were there to show off the capability of the material with the way it clashed with the otherwise regular geometric shapes that made up the building-block like constructions.

The stairs he'd come in on detached from the cavern walls and seemed to float autonomously in the air, leading to one of the platforms, a square of bluish-white opaque crystal connected to multiple walkways columns and stairs, some leading up, some down.

At its seams lapped not-quite-waves-not-quite-vapors of a very transparent, liquid-like material that glittered with a slight rainbow reflection, like the skin of a soap bubble, or a swirl of oil on water.

The structure of platforms and columns continued somewhat above and far below it; Despite being submerged, there was hardly any decrease in visibility if one peered down at the structures that grew stranger the further one peered down, housing rooms and glass-like pillars, sideways ziggurats and an impossible labyrinth of stair wells, walls covered in writing, pictogram or tile-like patterns, some of them resembling checkerboards and underwater towers;

It was a little like diving under the surface of a large swimming pool with water goggles, and observing the three-dimensional structures of the pool that one had never consciously paid attention to, including to pyramid-like drops toward where the deep end was or the jumping boards stood.

He walked up to the seemingly immaterial liquid, scanned it, and understood: Not only was it breathable, it was part of the interface, for what one might describe as a computer – If he could trust what he'd read, the Fabronians simply called it a machine, sometimes _the_ machine, or the sacred machine for the sentimental types – it was quite an unique contraption deserving of the definite article, but there was likely a psychic component to this contraption that the term 'machine' didn't fully cover, a slightly _living_ quality that he could feel all around him, a resonance exuding from the crystal –

So much here was crystal, the _same_ crystal used or those personalized keys and ultra-durable power relays, but on a much larger, more sophisticated scale, a flowing metamaterial as a vessel for thoughts, a network that pondered, daydreamed while it waited for its masters to return, almost but not quite the presence of an entity –

The experience of walking down these stairs, crossing the structures and wandering to the 'shore' was much more deserving of the term 'numinous' than anything the temple above had to offer, it felt closer to treading on a graveyard than everything in the entire empty city had, and more like a haunted mansion than most places afflicted with either a reputation is superstition or suspicious alien activity.

There was something real here, not quite as ridiculous as lovecraftian ancient whispers, but a subtler, less cartoonish equivalent one might metaphorically compare to such, a suggestion of thoughts, a slight affecting of focus and emphasis, no mystical visions but diffuse and conceptual mental images that could have been artistic rendition of this sparkly, solitary cave, had they not 'stylized' all other senses too, even the sensation of cool, fresh air that flowed into the sparkles in synesthesia, and though there was, without doubt, real sparkliness to be found here, it seemed intensified somehow, in a way that ebbed and flowed alongside a certain heavy, ceremonial feeling, more and more so the closer he came to the water.

Everything looked brighter, sharper, more defined, like ramping up the resolution of an image, or rather, his ability to perceive it – Details that would have eluded him normally, by virtue of his being all up in his head and having learned to watch for a small selection of the most indicative tidbits were crisp and clear, things he couldn't have focused on all at once just seemed to surround him casually, and curious, telling minutiae were to be glimpsed wherever he happened to look –

It was not just that the colors were more intense or that the lights seemed brighter – An equivalent of this was true for all senses, for sound and smell, even the brushing of his clothing against his skin, to the point that it all seemed equally bright and the notion seemed inescapable that what he thought to be separate indicators were just pieces of the same continum, that sound and sight and even _understanding_ were, on some level, fundamentally the same – concepts in his head, presumably.

We all only perceive the world through the simulations built by our brains, after all, and for once, he felt strongly reminded of that, especially since this occurred in a place as remarkable and intricate at all – It was almost overwhelming at times, a chill of sudden change making its way up its spine like a surge of feeling just before one could discern it enough to label it as good or bad, euphoria or dysphoria; It was just stimulation, and a _lot_ of it.

He almost felt tempted to close his eyes, ward off further perception until he could make heads or tails of the right now, but yet, he felt like retreating to process things would be cutting of the stream of magnificence – he knew he'd have all the time in the world to think about it later, but what his deliberations would or would not be able to turn up all depended on the available input, that is, on the rapid streams of consciousness he could only live through _right now._

He'd experienced quite a lot of things in his time, but sights like this were still rare enough that he felt tempted to sit down and take some time to adjust, though he did not, simply pausing in his steps where another flight of stairs continued straight down into the liquid.

It would have been an overstatement to compare it to the matrix; If the idea occurred to him at all, then because even with all his travels, it was impossible to completely unbind himself from his own culture as a frame of reference, but, few humanoids peoples came this close to something similar – now this down here really _was_ an eternal city, if the poetic flourish were pardoned; If it was ever forgiveable in any context, this was probably one of them.

The presence felt heavy in his mind, enough to set chills of anxiety down his spine, though he told himself that it was a mere reflexive reaction to stimulus and that he'd previously dealt with creatures and places that could induce them regardless of the onlooker's experience. Fear was, after all, all too closely related to excitement, it was all just an excitation of nerves that a disciplined mind should be able to recontextualize; He could allow it to stall him, or use it as fuel to plunge ahead, and that was what he chose to do – How could he waver, when he understood all too well what a treasure lay here before him?

He needn't confirm it, he just _knew,_ or rather, he _experienced_ it as an ineffable, non-debatable qualia, as fundamental as seeing the color red – all that was left for his mind to do was to recognize it and act accordingly, continuing to step forward onto the stairs even as he felt dizzy with the steadily increasing load of stimulus; The 'liquid' didn't really feel like one, becoming drenched in it was a light, soapy sensation. It occurred to him too late that he would also drench his beloved clothing and that he'd probably missed his chance to pick up suitable equipment at the last junction, but there was no turning back now.

He still figured that these skin-hugging overalls the Fabronians sometimes wore would have been rather practical here, but just kept on his way; It was too late now and he certainly didn't feel like turning back so close to the wealth of knowledge that lay buried here.

He didn't have to fight his reflexes too badly as he stepped through the surface, the discomfort was almost entirely on a psychological level; Precisely because of that, he'd have thought that it would be harder to overcome not just one, but two layers of instinctive reactions urging him first not to breathe in a liquid and second to trigger his respiratory bypass system, but the smooth, swirly texture of the cellophane glitter around him was barely beyond a particularly gelatinous gust of wind, and

His suspicious about the interface were confirmed when the intensity of the... phenomenon increased abruptly the moment he submerged his head past the surface. Before, it seemed merely to have intensified his perception of existing things, but now, there was something else, something _more._

At first, it seemed only like meaningless, static noise, an interference produced by trying to 'look' at his physical surroundings and the 'view' presented by the machine at the same time, or that was his theory – There were simple, noise-like things, an overlay of rainbow colors, traces of afterimages of things moved through his field of vision, fluid, breathing motion in a land of sharp angles, things that were easily dismissed as simply 'errors'.

But then, as he stumbled down the stairs in liquid suspension, he began to grasp the true extent of what this ingenious creation of the Fabronians was capable of – The first indication was when the visions somewhat solidified, becoming more concrete – trying to keep his balance, he glanced at a wall, and of all sudden, the blank rounded shapes of the pillar next to it was covered in writing – once he caught himself, placing his arms on his things for support, he looked around, and saw that there was faintly shimmering rainbow writing on _every_ surface – That, and math symbols, too, plusses and minuses and underlines mingled with the loops of cursive 'gs' and 'l's.

It wasn't machine writing or even any sort of orderly, presentable text, but chaotic, sideways writing, your classic “mad mathematician”, “room full of crazy” type of look, frantic scribble designed to merely _retain_ a multitude of ideas generated in a burst of inspiration, not to sell them.

Except, of course, that for most languages and mathematical formulas, he'd probably been

He could see the individual letters, but he couldn't make out the _whole_ , as much as that plagued his curiosity – He might have had some kind of mythical source code of the world before his eyes, perhaps a text from the machine interface or some interpretation of what he saw, but some far-flung intuition told him that he may not have gone deep enough to fully _see_ its meaning.

Of course, he knew that there might _be_ no meaning: The shape of symbols and language and their meaning could be quite disparate things for the brain, there'd been cases of brain damaged patients speaking in grammatically correct sentences made of actual worlds that were completely nonsensical. He might just be overwhelmed or unaccustomed to thins and reacting with mild halucinations, a wild outside triggering of brain regions that did not involve the one for meaning, even though the assortment of letters and math symbols was of correct shapes.

It was frustrating, though, that it seemed like there _was_ a puzzle to decipher, but no answer. It was that frustrated thought that led his attention away from the attempt to focus on the words to the writing itself, and the realization that it was _his handwriting_.

He couldn't say if it had _always_ been his handwriting, but it had assumed this state once he cared to focus, as if it were some Schroedingeresque radioisotope.

It was sort of sloppy and dissapointing in a way, but then again, this was _his mind_ interpreting what this machine sent it, what else would be the 'font' used by his brain? Comic Sans perhaps? He should not expect anything fancier than he could imagine – at least when it came to the illusions. They occupied him so much, he may have missed a more essential detail; The outside world in its conventional sense, the world in which he was walking down a flight of stairs, seemed increasingly harder to focus on with all these other channels of consciousness and perception opening up, and so, it took him a while to notice the obvious...

The writing – not the visual overlay, the _actual_ writing in the walls – It had changed, all of it had changed, and unlike with its psychic equivalent, he was _sure_ that it had once been a different handwriting, a more elegant cursive rather than his own hurried script.

The machine was already _responding_ to him, _physically_ adapting, no, connecting... Indeed, here was where the machine's construction revealed its true genius: While a classic computer was something that solved problems for you after receiving your input – no matter how complicated the problems or how seamless the man/machine interface – this one was different: Not only did it solve the tasks the users posed for it while relying on their supervision for orders and input, it formed a two-way conduit in which it also aided and supervised the thinking of the user – and in that way, it was truly distinct from the kind of device one would commonly call a 'computer' – The Doctor felt this enhancement quite distinctly, indeed, it was than what he could control, there were gentle suggestion lines as to where to direct his attentions, and he noted a flow of thought outside of the usual patterns – memories he hadn't reviewed in years were being called before his mind's eye because they were related to the trail of his thoughts, indeed, his momentary awareness seemed to jump around like a bouncing rubber ball in the network of ideas, emotions, memories and reaction patterns that constituted his greater self, outside the normal procedure of having to access one memory through another associated with it, like links in a chain.

Everything was experienced through a concept in his head, so everything was available to him – and yet more, further networks, nodes of alien thought and knowledge that increasingly became as available as his own memories – he had to note the ingenuity, your usual humanoid brain wouldn't be able to stand it if all this information was dumped into it at once, or I they were even forced to process it, sort through it – _He_ might be able to stand it, but he'd be redendered quite occupied and unproductive by the exercise, and most humans certainly _wouldn't –_ he wasn't even sure about Fabronians.

But using this? This natural manner of accessing stored, structured thought? Child's play! One would only access the information one needed or wanted without an uncontrolled flooding and yet, one would have it in mere moments, and feel most natural doing it.

If Intuition was defined as a process where multiple parts of the brain communicated with each other and functioned together despite their generally disparate tasks, then the Fabronians could be said to have built a bionic answer to it that worked better than the original, though the system was, at was, at its heart, an easy search data structure – a simplification that, to him, bolstered its brilliance rather than diminishing it. He could already discern from the databanks that his case wasn't an average one, that there had once been Priests (or perhaps one should call them 'Operators' or 'Technicians') working all over this complex, who would receive a few weeks of gradual training and at times even be given chemicals to boost their natural abilities, much like the psychic soldiers were.

With training, one could control and work with ones physical body in the real world, and, in parallel, access the vast sea of information inside the machine, and unpleasant side effects would quickly be reduced to a minimum.

He, of course, hadn't experienced such a careful introduction to this place; He had to jump in head first, didn't he? He wasn't prepared for the sensation of losing touch of his physical body – if he were, he would have been able to move it without problems or loss of control while still being relatively detached from it and moving about in the vault-like mindspace of the machine, but as it was, he struggled to walk forward and kept touching his own limbs and face to assure himself that they were still there by means of the resulting feedback.

His arms and legs seemed to dissolve into a tingly feelings, almost as if they ceased to be there until he moved them in a shockingly normal manner; It was as if his mind may be left behind as a naked figure of light, unburdened by flesh – it also distorted his perception of time as it passed, in theory, a brilliant arrangement – always operating at that split-second choice slowed-down eternal moment pace would be supremely impractical in real life, apart from the rare moments where such a thing was activated by instinct – But in the machine, thought would be free to move as fast as the brain would let it, and still be slower than what the hardware could keep up with, running long strings of calculations and thought-trains while their physical body executed its much slower motions, effectively, giving the operators almost perfect freedom in cyberspace, limited only by their brains themselves, or, the brains when they were supported by the machine's help in guiding their systems. –

But right now, that same fancy invention was making it very hard to walk and keep his balance while doing it – He'd reach out on a far-flung trail of thought and questioning and then, suddenly, some aspect of his physicality would summon him back to the here and now, to begin the next movement necessary for walking – At first, he thought he could turn his motions into an useful, grounding mechanism, but his attempts at climbing down the stairs became increasingly uncoordinated, he simply could not settle on a rhythm with his perception this distorted – In the time it took for his heel to touch the ground after his toes had made contact, he'd have gotten distracted, forgotten what he was doing and needed to recall it all again before he could move.

This, however, did not mean that the state he was in was wholly akin to a prophetic fervor or numbing intoxication – In some ways, his sober analytic mind was still working, it just wasn't operating at the normal speed of the physical plane anymore – His skepticism wasn't impaired, he was quite capable of doubting his however wild perceptions, separating emotions and impressions from fact and maintaining a dispassionate, analytical perspective –

He could even tell he was staggering, but his attempts to do something about it didn't quite come through, or did so only with lags or delays – And it was getting progressively harder to focus on the physical world as his field of vision was increasingly overtaken by the interface – almost like in a broken monitor, large rounded parts of it were just completely... well, not blacked out, but replaced by visuals he couldn't even make sense of, at least not any more than the writing he'd seen before – they looked like fractals, or mandalas, or stained-glass windows, vibrant, unreal colors of living jewel, and he knew, he just _knew_ where great parts of the lower city had taken their inspiration from – increasingly, his mind was taken by flashes in which the room seemed to shift and change, where basic shapes and shadows received reassigned meanings in which, for example, doorways could briefly become windows in a strange shadowy palace, or dots of colorful light melted into flower petals, or shadows that became outstretched hands welcomning him home.

Then, of course, he lost his footing, perhaps because of his reaction to that realization, and he couldn't even say if he'd fallen off the stairs or rolled down because at this point, the external world completely _vanished_ , and geometric surrealist messes took his field of vision for themselves; Were he of the superstitious sort, he might call this an 'out of body experience' – There was no sensation by which to define his own outline, nothing but a possibly unwarranted sense of falling, falling, falling which then too seemed to fade into the distance, leaving him to his much-enhanced thoughts and the contents of that remarkable machine.

At long last, what he'd thought to be the back of his mind was kicked open like a stubborn jammed hatch, and this bizarre osmosis settled into a kind of equilibrium at long last;

All around him, lights and symbols fired off and there were presences that almost seemed familiar, like a chorus of chanting voices of probing hands whose thousand-fold touches seemed to welcome him, drawing him deeper and deeper into the now completed link as they told him the entire story of their city's founding all the way to the present day in a multitude of fashions, from raw individual life stories, poetic archetypical distillations to dry and technical descriptions of the overall factual occurrences; A million shimmering fragments of images glittered around him, pictures full of fire, strife and ancient secrets, until finally, he began to see the _meaning_ behind every single of the bizarre sights and sensations he had experienced, the higher-dimensional lining of significance imparted on what first seemed like simple geometric shapes and colorful rosettes.

Deeper still, he found the basic conceptual networks of the machine, and, reflected within them, those of his own mind; He found himself intensely aware of the connections and equivalences he personally struck behind all things, and the network-machinery of reasons behind all his feelings, intuitions and perceptions, and met with the architects that had designed his visions for him, at the same time being lucid enough to recognize how much this was a simplification of his own mind, in which he was talking to no one but himself and this machine, and with both these perspectives combined and finally reaching a harmonic overlay at long, long last, he could see the purpose and utility in the patterns he'd first seen as a glittering light show and read the elusive writing on the walls, and here, he found what to a being with any less experience, must have been seemed like a faithful simulacrum of enlightenment.

 

That was almost two days ago.

Though it was still easier to keep his eyes closed, he could now open them when he chose to and perceive the outer world without much difficulty, complete with an added overlay of luminous writing annotating what he saw – on the few occasions that he did, he'd see crystal-like structured both pearly and transparent, both sharp-angled and cylindrical, everywhere columns, platforms, a labyrinth or walls or geometric shapes.

Physically, he'd done little more over the past few days than to float suspended in the interface liquid, drifting aimlessly through the megastructure, aware that one advantage offered by flooding the whole place with interface liquid instead of using enclosed chambers and capsules as it had been done in the early stages of the technology was how the entire area could be utilized in a three-dimensional manner, allowing operators to move around in length, breadth and depth.

Before he stepped inside this chamber, he hadn't known that – information about this place hadn't been too forthcoming in the public archives, at least not in a manner that would have allowed him to piece together the true nature of this place beyond simply being a special place of ritual importance that could be accessed from beneath the temple – Now, he could access that knowledge as easy as his own memories, and even playfully wander onto further knowledge like on an immeasurably more sophisticated internet search, for example, he could glimpse that besides the temple, the central buildings of the parliament, high court and several elected government buildings had an access port leading down here, as did at least two of the historic personal palaces once owned by aristocratic families and some scientific institutions.

 

Though his physicality had rested idly, his mind had not rested for a single moment, his brain a buzzing hive of relentless activity – as it would turn out, there was as vast a labyrinth in here as in the city above, not in terms of physical space (the cavern was hardly impressive after one had seen the lentil-shaped dome whose very bottom housed it), but in terms of the depth present in the cyberspace – And even his two-day long wanderings amountedto little more than a casual wiki-walk through virtual halls as majestic and ancient as the virtual ones.

 _Metaphorical_ halls, that is, the interface made full use of its disembodied nature and, like much Fabronian engineering, didn't waste much time mimicking natural affairs while still remaining amenable to humanoid intuition.

Much like the city above, it was a stratified monument cataloging the contributions of countless generations, in a manner that almost resembled the natural growth of a tree or the sediment layers in a mountain –

 

Already remarkable at the point of its inception, the Machine had been in use for a long time and refined its function through learning alghorithms this entire time, to the point that it outperformed other prototypes with newer software through sheer 'experience', a trait that seemed oddly more like it would describe a person with intrinsic value, not the rapidly modernizing forward grind of technology – Similar structures, often intertwined with other, specific functions, had at time been erected on colony worlds and he even suspected (no, looked up: There barely seemed to be difference between the two in this state) that the structure that had become of key importance in the Time War had been of Fabronian make, a novel energy source made possible by unique features of that particular star system and its local spacetime – The link between the device and space itself had also been responsible for the vastness of the resulting destruction.

Even now, he was surprised at the way his thoughts and speculations would dart forward in their usual, imprecise way, only for the pathways of the machine to apply supplemental information as if they were further illuminating or adding detail to a partially finished image, filling out the unexplored blackness like in a strategy video game.

In part because of that, he understood that _this_ was a two-way process, too: The machine learned from the patterns of access and movement of the interfacing minds, using the 'smaller' networks that made up the individual minds as examples to refine its own pathways through a similar method of strengthening or weakening patterns – In a sense, every individual operator who had worked here however briefly had left a slight impression of themselves behind, not enough to leave an individual touch, but sufficient to imbue the Machine with basic fragments of sparks that, in this network, could conglomerate into a greater whole, a touchable afterimage of Fabronian thinking, and the thinking of the machine's users in particular – as in all professions, there ought to have been certain personality profiles that were more common in the job of a priest or operator, perhaps conflicting ones, that would have build overall reactivity 'profile' of the superstructure, though some specks from outliers and the occasional politician must be in here as well –

 

Overall, the many voices melded into an indistinct chorus, but one exception were those individuals who had remained here after the evacuation, for there had been no one here to offset them and the bias introduced by their small number, and due to their frequent but exclusive use, they had left a more holistic imprint – and he knew now that it was small indeed, there was nobody here but the same two individuals who'd had tea in the Gallery as he'd been napping. At least, nobody else had accessed the machine.

He still did not know their names, nor had he ever met them, but just from the traces of their activities within the machine, his idea of them became much sharper, and took the distinct shapes of a Madam and a Prince, with all the connotations and associations one would attribute to those words.

He was certain now that it was the Prince whose room he had stepped foot in, not because it was recorded somewhere, but because the manner in which he moved through conceptual space was much reminiscent of his carelessly thrown belongings; Just by thinking back to the room, ambiguities in its meanings were clarified for him by a machine that knew what the place looked like from his very own perspective – What his choice of words also denoted was that the pair was of aristocratic origin, of this, he was certain, and everything else he had seen fit in all around it – who else would refuse to leave the city and instead favor haughty isolation, who else would find in themselves the hybris to “rule” over a kingdom with no people, but someone who did not care?

He also knew that this second person was a male, not so much by his own tracks but by how the Lady referred to him in her own movements; It was apparent now that it was _her_ collection of clothing he had spotted, _her_ dress he had seen laid out, and _her_ choice to pick the theater to live in – by the looks of it, the boy didn't much care either way.

He knew also that it had been _her_ handwriting – regal and cursive – which had adorned the walls until right before he fully connected and inadvertently replaced it with his own, making her the last individual to have used it.

 

His odds of ever meeting them were still rather low, but if he did, they would be not exactly acquaintances, but not complete strangers, either – Nor would he be able to look at Xalax, or indeed, _Fabron_ the same way as he did before. When he got out of here and continued his journey, he would no longer be exploring unknown lands, nor something he held mostly abstract knowledge of, but rather, confirming for himself and forming his own opinion of something he was hardly a stranger to – This virtual experience by proxy could not replicate the very own, intimate knowledge he had of places like Earth's London, Trenzalore's Christmas Town, Gallifrey's Citadel or the wilds around his home village, but even so, Xalax would from now on be a little more than a place he'd visited just one, and seeing the rest of it would feel more like seeing the capital of one's home country, already knowing everything about it's history and associations, or, like spotting a constellation after knowing the names and natures of most its stars, which ones were red dwarfs, blue giants and so on – Should he ever find his way to Fabron again, perhaps accompanied by a friend or two, there would be some good opportunities for some serious showing off.

Even so, he couldn't hope to learn all the Machine could teach him in such a short time, but he could learn _enough_ , as its means of imparting knowledge were rather holistic – it took time to learn all the details, ins and outs of a given topic, but it was shocking just how quickly he could gain a broad enough overview, basic principle or salient intuition, to the point that he felt he could independently deduce some of the things he didn't know yet.

 

So, he remained adrift, motionless, simply not present in his physicality, as his mind continued his prior wanderings independently on his flesh.

Objectively, his stay in the Machine had only taken up a fraction of his time in Xalax, and though he'd been overwhelmed, his time-related sensed were not so impaired that he couldn't tell that. But on a subjective level, in direct contradiction to all rationality and his better knowledge, it still felt somehow that he'd spent a long, long time inside here, longer than his overall stay on this planet, long enough that it surprised him that he didn't feel the need for food or rest, and why would he, if what felt like hours had merely been minutes as far as his body was concerned?

It was a strange kind of liberation, incomplete and illusory as it may have been – Though the interface liquid was engineered to have hydrating and revitalizing properties, he knew that the needs of the flesh would have forced him to stop eventually should he attempt to continue this indefinitely.

But at least for now, he reveled in the expanse of data and knowledge, taking precise inventory of how far the Fabronians had come in terms of scientific knowledge and studying in detail the blueprints that made their impressive technology possible, all the while listening for the echoes of both current and long gone residents – He had a couple of field days here, during which his body lay forgotten in the sands of time, drifting through the surreal structures of the machine without grazing the realm of relevancy –

He only remembered where it was when he felt the connection waning, swiftly deducing that he must be moving out of the range in which full scale connection was possible.

But before he could gather up his body and open his eyes to do something about it, the fill effects of the disconnection process set in, and they proved just as overwhelming as the initial connection – His reaction speed in corporeal reality, as honed as it was from years of experience, now seemed to him to be unbelievably sluggish, the light semi-liquid feeling as viscous as jelly and returning to his fixed patterns in thought as they had been without the machine's support was a paralyzing shock that left him confused and ineffectual – He never got a concrete impression or perception of the physical area he was in when it happened. He tried to open his eyes, but he couldn't even tell whether he ever got them open, and if he did, it was beyond him to process what he saw.

The image of the world as constructed by his brain was distorted and interrupted as the connection snapped, and it was, to him, as if in a reverse of the expansion and intensification he'd experienced before, everything he could perceive felt distant and attenuated, so unreal and far away that though it was there, it didn't seem to matter enough to perceive, or so it was at first – before he knew it, in the process of feebly realizing that he'd have to expend the necessary willpower to force himself to focus on his surroundings no matter how unreal they felt, it was as if he had no connection to his senses at all, no sight, no touch, not even a sense of position or balance, only a plunge into a deep, dark hole, his numbed consciousness a meteor in the absolute dark tumbling down total freefall.

 

 

As such, it was hard to determine if he'd been unconscious or merely unaware, but the sensation of coming to much resembled that of coming out of a dream, and the networks he could easily access just moments before took the place of the elusive memory of dreams and the way they would rapidly fade away if one didn't scramble to hold onto it – What he'd deliberately sought out and taken a conscious look at was still there and would stay with him forever, but that was but a tiny fraction of all that had been free for the taking within the machine.

But even so, even without the full extent of its knowledge, he'd seen enough, at least in regards to some concerns that he could only look beyond because he could now estimate just how much he was still ignorant off.

He was not the slightest bit surprised when he came to wind that he'd been washed up on something resembling a shoreline, where the rainbow-liquid was tinted in oranges and reds by an ambiguous luminescence that shone onto it and the fine, crystalline sand its waves lapped onto, a finer variant of salt or glitter powder that he found himself laying on, facing upwards, his body placed alongside the subterranean shore.

His eyes opened slowly and somberly, fully expecting to find a golf-ball-like artificial dome stretching over him, a rounded canopy topped off with multiple round blotches possessed of an ambiguous reddish luminescence of possibly biological origin.

In silence, he sat up, already knowing full well where he was, that is, to the extent that anyone did: Not even the Fabronians knew who had built this cavern, only that they'd stumbled upon it during the excavations necessary to construct the lower supports of the dome, and that they weren't seeing it for the first time – a similar, but not identical dark twin of it had been known to the colonists from the outer system, the same ones whose reconquest of Xalax had heralded the second florescence – indeed, at least as far its material went, the Xalaxian dome had been inspired by that other structure, itself long lost after having been co-opted as a base by one faction, destroyed not by bombs, but the powerful psychics that the outer system's settlers had created.

It followed that it had not held whatever it was that had given their augmentation experiments the sudden edge that had eventually won them the war – the relation was, in fact, the other way around – telepaths and clairvoyants had discovered both these spheres guided by some diffuse intuition. That was the common story among those in the know, and what he'd read of the personal memoirs written by the leading elites, their generals and their soldiers seemed to promt those same construction.

He could see in his minds eye the remaining images of the other lost structure, a completely different technological aesthetics of blocky edges, minimalism and black-and-white lines. He couldn't be sure without inspecting it himself, but he'd wager that it had once been some sort of control panel – what for, he couldn't say, but he already knew that _this_ cavern had been different.

 

After rising to his feet, he could see more of the “beach” and saw, first and foremost, a clashing of industry and monument that made one wonder which of the two had been allowed to be there in spite of the other's importance.

He'd come from an opening in the side of the spherical structure that lead to the machine's chambers and had been broken open when It had first been discovered.

From that opening, a multitude of industrial tubes proceeded into the cavern, some of them thick as motorway tunnels, but finer ones, too.

They passed over his head, all labeled with various red symbols roughly where they passed the shore line, continuing inwards.

As for the 'shore' itself, it continued at length to both sides but was broken at times by small 'creeks' of rainbow-shimmering fluid that seemed to be coming from further inland, to wherever the tubes were leading.

And they weren't the only features along the 'beach': It was dotted by simple black grave markers, uncharacteristically unadorned for anything of Fabronian make.

He knew whose they were, of course – They were buried here, at the heart and source of the Fabronians' Fearsome power because it was here where their reminder was most needed – The study dome had enabled the city's inhabitants to survive the onslaught that 'sank' them, but though it had spared them the brunt of the radiation, leading to their not-being-vaporized-on-the-spot, it was, as all technology, imperfect.

A lot of the damage resulting from the irradiation could be healed, the bleedings, anemia and cancers could usually be stopped and if not, the ones so afflicted always had the option of discarding their flesh for part-mechanical bodies which, at this point in Xalax' technological development, could offer them all amenities of the flesh save one: Procreation.

All other malfunctions could be compensating for, but like a hard drive that had been corrupted, the information in their scrambled genes was gone for good.

 

Cut off from the world, the survivors eventually realized that they would have to bring children into their dark prison if their culture was to survive, and even after suffering the shame of humbling defeat, they were to proud to let it go, so those who still had the gonads they were born with after they were done renovating their bodies attempted to conceive. For many, it was fruitless, and even the artificial methods that were eventually employed had a limited rate of success, resulting in many stillbirths and fatally malformed mutant children – they, rather than the rather few casualties of the sinking itself were honored here.

It was the descendants of their more viable brothers and sisters that had eventually carried on their legacy and gone on to build the structures outside the ring gates – so perhaps, at a time, this had been a place intended to honor the sacrifice, the ashes from which the Xalaxians had then arisen once those resilient enough not to be buried here had brought forth a newer, stronger people – but in hindsight it seemed more like a prologue of this world's eventual fate, especially since even they with their bountiful paradise and awesome might had never stopped to use and rely upon a power even they did not fully understand;

Even the graves of the innocent small ones lay in the shadow of the focal point that all vapour-like streams and enormous tubes were leading to, a mass the size of a small mountain, the most surreal sight of all.

Its central parts were so motionless that it could have been thought to be a grotesque statue, perhaps a nightmarish impression of the dead goddess that was supposed to lay here, but the twitching of its periphery assured him that it was very much a creature, an enormous, titanic mound of white, chalk-like flesh, in places soft and in others calcified and rigid, barely distinguishable from limestone, but still resembling an avalanche of fat and skin in its form, except where the crumpled edges of it touched the enormous tubes that pierced its central mass, firmly embedded there though rivulets of fluid leaked from its margins, minuscule compared to the body and the tubes, but still forming creeks and brooks that rolled off to the shore because of both their titanic sizes.

It was an uncanny sight that evoked primal revulsion, though there was nothing inherently monstrous about it; It was made up completely out of familiar shapes that were simply misplaced and rearranged, a flurried sea of noses, mouths, ribs and unseeing eyes, its outskirts formed by a multitude of progressively smaller humanoid arms and legs that poked out of its periphery and, indeed, each other, the smallest of them usually human-sized though even smaller protrusions could be seen here and there, and some, particularly closer to the inner mass, were lined with eyes and mouths in places where they clearly not belonged, swirls of breasts, organs and facial featured adorning the fat folds of its central mass, some kind of obscenely bloated, massive belly lined at its edges with petal-like protrusions one would _not_ find on an average humanoid, in places warped and twisted, but still recognizable as angelic wings, specks of beauty amid a mess of protruding spider-veins, legs poking out of mouths and tongues lolling out of eyelids.

Had he encountered it before his time in the machine, he would have been mighty bewildered and would have stood there gaping, mighty eyebrows furrowed.

Now, of course, he knew what _it_ was, too, and faced its sight with an expression of solemn understanding and sober detachment.

The sight before him may well have been called an atrocity, but at this point, there wasn't really anything to be done anymore, and no more misery left to end.

The sprawling mass before him constituted the remains of a creature with immense regenerative capacities, able to regrow and replenish its body whenever it was sliced, but its brain had been extinguished for a very long time – the periphery of its still-pulsing cadaver kept trying to mend itself, but without a central organization or any image according to which to rebuild itself, it kept sprouting body parts with little sense or order.

One of the large tubes that pierced it was delivering feed and hydration to sustain the increase in mass, but without that, it would at most remain static. It was like a carcass on life support whose heart was kept beating by artificial means, except that in this case, much of the life support was composed of its own body.

It wasn't quite clear how this being had gotten here; Perhaps this artificial cavern and its twin had been part of burial rite, or they were a ship that had crash-landed here eons ago? Had the being been dead all along when the Fabronians first found it, or did they kill it when it was weak and dormant, finishing it off before it could revive?

The ancients had taken all this to their graves, but the Fabronian were certain that both this cavern found on their own world and the similar one found on a moon of an outer gas giant must be incredibly ancient itself, dating back to long before Fabron was home to any kind of civilization.

It had once been close to humanoid, but once the Xalaxian researchers began their prodding, the cuts they made to dissect the alien had only succeeded in spawning chaotic appendages in mindless, automatized attempts at self-repair. Later, it had been cut many times on purpose, to encourage these disordered growths and ultimately increase its mass to the hideous abomination it was now, so that more of its ichor could be harvested – see, the Xalaxians found it to have a number of useful properties, and indeed, it was to become the base ingredient of wondrous things like the machine's interface liquid and the key crystal material that was used throughout the city – there was so much of it and all of it was the product of this unsightly travesty, euphemistically known as the 'main crystal plant'.

No wonder that all the literature had been so taciturn about just where those things had come from.

 

 

 


	11. Day 17

Day 17 

 

There was a cascading melody, and at first, it might have been all there was, a solitary waveform carving out existence, before it distinctly took on the characteristics of audible song traveling through air, echoing through physicality.

The reverberation was a lure that attracted attention, in a form subtler than eyes or observers, but nonetheless a basic invitation to follow after it, in which _following,_ no matter if you meant it with regards to actions, opinions, or simple physical motion, described a passive motion where the determination of the goal happens outside yourself – The song echoed through jewel-paved streets and golden halls, along aqueducts and rows of rounded little trees planted in neat little squares of earth that lined the shining streets, and because of that, he was drawn to follow it as it waned and waxed, swiftly and steadily, almost with a kind of vital relish that seemed alien to him, a course of thought and action pursued by him, but wrapped in the coating of another existence, perhaps the one possessed of the broad, powerful voice full of coloration that seemed to draw him in –

Her song led him cross valleys of mosaic and forests of marble columns, the very own hidden, enclosed biome of a very few select souls, over a criss-cross of city both familiar and unfamiliar to him, before slowing to reach a place that fell in the later category: The aristocrat's park theater house in Xalax, to be exact, the golden opera room.

In its hall, sliding across the fractal patterns engraved in the stage floor were a pair of small feet encased in pearl-studded slippers, following the melody in exuberant celebration, surrounded by another sight he wasn't seeing for the first time: The pink baroque dress.

Except this time, it wasn't resting empty on a chair, but filled opulently like the skin of a ripe fruit, containing a body that was not as elegantly delicate as one might have suspected, but no less regal in its taut display of eternal youth: The Lady was a short woman with strong limbs that were somewhat short in proportion to her firm torso and cello-like waist which just in terms of bone structure only narrowed so far, filling out the dress that had been tailored, or, more likely, replicated precisely to her measurements, so that it fit perfectly without anything stretching or bulging apart from the quite intentional spilling of her breasts from the lace-framed neckline (a state which he noted dispassionately, as one would factually describe a timid, forest-dwelling creature one had caught a rare glimpse of), adorned with a string of pearls that wrapped twice around her neck that tapped against it as she turned in her dance, pulling off a surprisingly wild and dynamic motion reminiscent of a tarantella dance despite her fancy getup, though one would figure that she'd had a long, long time to practice.

Numerous individual little ornaments glittered all around her garment, shaking each time the soles of her feet struck the ground, ring-laden fingers draped with golden bangles moving around in a manner that was playful and whimsical but still distinctly aristocratic and ringing out with both long-practiced skill and the passion of ancient days.

Though he frequently caught sight of her long, silver hair, this vision-montage only included very few, occasional glimpses of her face, usually with her eyes still closed in relish and a thin, poised smile gracing her lips: She had lustrous, sumptuous dark skin of a warm, rufuous chestnut brown that contrasted with her straight silver hair that she wore in a ponytails, with a few bangs hanging into her forehead and two strands hanging down to her chin in narrow strips next to her ear, its elaborateness seeming to underline her noble status.

She had strong yer refined features with the typical purple forehead splotches common in her people and a lavish ornament located right next to the to the right of her face, including an artificial flower of white silk, bits of chiffon and intricate strings of pearls that somehow stayed in place despite her torrential motions, much like her heavy golden earrings; The flawless image that, in any other context, would have been created only through stylization and embellishment, was a day-to-day reality in this Lady's luxurious world – It was likely that she'd never even known the slightest deprivations.

Only when she was finished dancing to her hearts content did she pause, hands still held crossed over her head in the last of her poses, one foot placed sideways relative to the one behind it, until she broke out of formation at the same time that her reflective turquoise eyes opened, somehow seemed to reveal vastly more of the piercing, radiant existence that smiled like she had just told a secret, or proudly finished a quite deliberate performance, though there was no one here to see her, and no one _could_ have been there for a very long time -

 

Except, perhaps, for the malcontent youth who lounged in a nearby chair, one leg drawn close to his body and rested on the cushion while the other carelessly spread onto the floor, resting on its heel as he observed the spectacle with a rather listless expression.

 

 

***

 

The scene changed to the seemingly impossible figures of the machine with its platforms and columns, labyrinthine stairways and long engraved obelisks.

On one of the platforms, there was something like a throne of block-like, solid crystal, far more geometric than the lavish baroque structures just above, and seated on it was an image of pomp and opulence that might just as easily be mistaken for a statue, both for its motionless inertia and it's lavish decoration.

At the basic level, his attire consisted of a skin-hugging, violet bodysuit enclosing everything up to his neck, a loose-fitting white toga, and a whole lot of jewel, including the large elliptical brooch and wide golden belt that kept it all in place. He was so heavyly laden with Baubles that he would have the Emperors of Babylon look like destitute paupers in comparison: The Belt was wide as a small plate and composed of three rows of precious stones in ornamental metal casings, golden braces adorned his forearms and ankles, their metal reliefs depicting mythological scenes, large golden rings hung off his ears whereas numerous jewel rings glittered at his fingers and a multitude of chains hung off his neck, both broader, sash-like constructs of golden wire and stone, as well as chains with both heavy amulets and many glittering stones on each segment, topped off by a crown that, as a simple golden ring around his head, seemed almost minimalistic in comparison to it all.

The boy himself, roughly in his late teens by appearance but evidently much older in spirit, seemed to share the lady's modest stature and skin tone, but was somewhat leaner or even androgynous in build, which, to certain human audiences, may have been compounded by his long, dense shiny black hair reaching all the way to his rear where it was sharply cut off in a clear line, with the exception of a few bangs which were instead cut off a little above his eyes, hanging over his crown, though the Xalaxians themselves never differentiated between men's or women's hairstyles. There he was:

A living, breathing Xalaxian, authentic bar whatever had kept him from being dead.

 

He sat there much like later generations of Fabronians would have envisioned the ancients, projecting an image that was oddly pharaonic, throning there unmoving like a god, presiding over his make believe kingdom of 'no people'.

Of course, one could say that _all_ kingdoms were made up: They were not their land, as they could lose or gain territory. They were not their culture, as culture always changed over time, no matter how much the current incarnation always presented itself as if it had always been there. They were not the government, for it could be overthrown and replaced by another, nor were they tied to ethnicity, as one people could be split among multiple nations and one nation contain many peoples – Which is not to say that a kingdom was invulnerable and immortal: If the powers that be decided that it was to be dissolved, it would be gone in an instant, even if its land, people and riches remained untouched.

Kingdoms, like companies, laws or mathematical functions or gods was one of these things that existed simply because people defined it into existence – that did not mean that they were lies, charades or illusions, indeed, they could trigger vast changes in the physical world through their presence in the heads of men and as such quite real, but they had no physical substance, instead adding another semantic layer to the world, not so much a fact as an _interpretation_ of a fact, an abstraction.

All kingdoms were abstracted, it was just a little more obvious with what remained of the Xalaxian empire – and this might make it particularly nebulous in a pragmatic sense, or, all the more interesting for its pure state as outliers often were though their significance remained negligible – If only two people believed in the Xalaxian Empire, did that make it less real? F so, what minimum number of believers was needed? Their claim would be very different if they lived surrounded by people who did not share their belief, but as the only people down here, their claim to the city was technically uncontested...

 

It was then that the Doctor saw the Prince shift, turquoise eyes seeming to fixate on his person, appearing to glow particularly in the half-illuminated environment of the machine.

He couldn't even say how this was possible, for he himself was _not_ in the machine cavern and he had no sense of his own presence in this... vision, nor any feeling that it – be it an ordinary dream or perhaps a product of psychic resonance amplified by these crystals – actually _contained_ him, there was only a bird's eye views lacking in any bodily sensations or perception of balance or position in space – and yet, he couldn't shake the impression that the prince was staring him straight in the eye, and not flinching at what he saw.

 

***

 

There was another melody, a whole different kind of music, more instrumental in nature, somewhere between a violin and a concertina I one were forced to express it in earth terms, a circling, rich sound full of stories, many of which were bound to be revealed to him as someone who had been in the machine.

The song itself could have been an ancient city with countless streets and passages, each line o instrument and cultural connotation opening up alleyways.

It was the golden opera hall again, but the lower seats were gone, removed perhaps by some trick in the architecture or some of those untiring robots, without doubt taking little more than a wave from the arms of its inhabitants, both of which now sat where the center of the flower-like fractal patterning of the floor was, where the presence of the chairs would normally have prevented him from spreading themselves out quite so comfortably.

Te Lady sat on the floor, a dress of mother-of-pearl like white and brocade clue flowing around her, spreading a circle around her. Fine works of silver and gold ascended up the artistic garment, serving as a separator between cellophane-like filter materials in the shapes of birds and butterflies that lay over the white areas like latticework, leading up to the gigantic Sapphire shimmering above her chest.

Her companion, meanwhile, was spread on the exquisite carpet her dress provided, head resting on his folded arms that rested on her lap as his long hair flowed down his back.

His own attire was markedly less gaudy, consisting only of a dark green tunic, a matching headband, and the same gold earrings as before.

The lady responded to the youth's presence with an absentminded caress of his cheek, though this was by no means a romantic or tender gesture but more of a playfully-indulgent gesture.

Indeed, their relation promptly revealed itself to be of a completely different number:

“Mother!” he spoke with some annoyance, and it was shocking how normal his voice sounded, like it could have belonged to any young man living a life out there with friends and hopes of reaching maturity. “That troublesome man is still in our city! I can _sense_ him! Don't you think we should do something about him?”

The woman seemed to have a much more patient outlook on this, speaking with the unwavering calm of ages: “There is no need of that. He will be gone soon by the looks of it.”

“You said that before!” Her son quipped, displeased, but nor really angry enough to put up a fight, seeming more listless about this than anything else. “He has no business being here, some upstart outsider like that...”

“Upstart?” the woman repeated, mildly amused. “That creature is older than I am.”

The Prince perked up, raising his head from its rest to look up at the Lady. “For real?”

“I'd have expected you to be able to tell.”

“I did!” the apparent boy defended himself, propping himself up by his arms. “I figured he was older than he looks, but, _that_ much?”

“How he looks isn't terribly relevant. He's a Time Lord. Their life cycle has a few... oddities, and besides, they can easily match a Lendaran Hive Queen in terms of lifespan; He could still be well within his natural range.”

“For real?” He asked in disbelief, and for one moment, his face belied a kind of genuine astonishment that immortals didn't often experience. “We haven't heard from any Gallifreyans in a _long_ time. Weren't they wiped out?” Soon, however, he caught himself and his eyes narrowed at the prospect of a nuisance. “You think he's here to meddle with us?”

The lady shook her much-decorated head.

“If that was his intention he's doing avery good job. By now, he must have been aware of our presence, especially given where he's been. Whatever his intentions are, they are part of the world out there, and none of it is any concern of ours. He will pass. Just like everything does, in the end.“

“If you say so...”

 

 

***

 

Rubbing his eyes as he peered slightly through them, refraining from opening them fully in an environment overwhelmed with bright light, the Doctor eventually found himself lying on his stomach at the edge of a corridor, struggling to puzzle together how he had gotten here, and just where exactly he was.

He didn't know how he had managed to get lost in this city after all of this, but he supposed that there must have been further side effects from connecting to the machine without prior training, or perhaps some incompatibility based on his brain being somewhat disparate from a Fabronian one.

At first, he had been fine, if not more than that, but with some delay, some further side effects had set in, nothing heavy and certainly nothing like a heavy physical hangover with aches and general discomfort, but something notably more mental that left him feeling rather scattered and scrambled – even by his standards – and, in a clear difference to his normal state, lacking in much incentive, motivation or capacity for divergent, creative thought.

He'd simply decided to walk it off and make his way back to the TARDIS, but that had not quite worked out, at least not directly. With his capacity for attention and concentration somewhat compromised, he kept forgetting where he was going and, what's more, ambling around without really spotting other interesting destinations as he usually would – Even the insights he had gained before had seemed rather diffuse and indistinct in that state, though he tried to vaguely aim for the surface whenever he could form a clear thought.

When he finally did what he should have done a long time ago and simply gave up, sinking into a disorderly heap without even bothering to find a designated sleeping spot (who's to tell _him_ where to sleep, especially down here?), he admittedly had no idea where he was, indeed, he had theorized that he must have been deep down in the complex, but he wasn't even sure of that – In that state, the corridors looked all the same to him, and he couldn't be sure that he hadn't been walking in circles.

He'd hoped that he'd wake up more refreshed and indeed, he had – his body had done its usual magic and patched itself back together rather thoroughly, but this was rendered quite irrelevant by what it was that woke him up: Soft, warm sunlight coming in from one of the large, rectangular windows that insofar as he thought earlier might as well have lead to some dark atrium.

A _lot_ of what he had been thinking before, while falling asleep or coming out of it, had been rendered very obsolete. He could _smell_ the surface atmosphere, and it was probably indicative of just how far out of it he'd been before that he hadn't noticed it, even in the dark – he ought to be thankful that he didn't mistake them for glass panels and fall out of one.

Corollary: He should probably discard whatever he'd been thinking or dreaming off before anyway, as it was likely to be scrambled beyond all use, or that, at least, was his later retroactive conclusion. In that moment proper he was, quite frankly, wholly distracted in a way that he couldn't blame on the machine anymore: He rushed to the window to take in the air and savor the sunlight on his skin, suddenly aware that he hadn't stood in actual starlight for quite a while, even though he understood that there wasn't any substantial difference – indeed, though it wasn't yet as ruined as it would one day be, this atmosphere wasn't anything to get excited about.

But more importantly: He could see the tower he'd left the TARDIS in!

Now _that_ merited some rejoicement if anything did, he couldn't _wait_ to get back to his old familiar blue box, and he didn't even debate as to where he would be going next, and the secrets of the city below lying under his feet were forgotten once more as he raced toward his familiar blue box, his mind already entranced by the next batch of sights to see, and, o course his cherished time machine was _always_ a welcome sight.

 

Of course, as far as welcome sights went, he could think of another one he hadn't seen in a while...

 

 


	12. Night 1

 

Night 1

 

Perhaps Vashtra had been right after all: On days like this, Clara found herself wondering if she _did_ actually have some subtle sixth sense to detect the imminent presence of a certain Time Lord.

Sure, it wasn't anything quite as flashy or reassuring as a sudden flash or spider senses, an infallible intuition or a sense that the room temperature was suddenly dropping to announce his presence – instead, she'd find herself fidgeting occasionally, tapping the points of one food on the ground or simply sliding into a general sense of subliminal restlessness that seemed more apparent to others than herself.

She'd pass some sort of imperceptible magical tipping point before which she would have been quite happily engrossed in her work, her relationship and the whole rest of her life, or, initially, even kind o relieved to get break from all the madness, but then, without any discernible trigger or cause there would come a moment where she'd feel impatience building up, or find herself shooting the occasional longing looks to a photograph of an old building or a distant star.

As in all friendships, one would think of things to tell or do with ones friends that would be stopped or postponed due to the absence of said friend, things she believed he'd like, jokes she'd like to tell or things she'd like to vent on, though she was usually to proud to use her phone, confident that he would turn up soon enough and that she should try to enjoy the moments in between.

In the mornings, she would find herself picking out clothes that were practical to run in, foregoing the heels she'd been picking out to impress Danny for her trusted old biker boots, 'just in case', not even given it all that much thought as she proceeded through her days, wondering occasionally what her wayward friend might be doing “right now”, for some definition thereof – There was a good chance that there were at least four versions of him running around on Earth at any given moment, but her thoughts referred more to the version that had departed from the school's supply closet last week and was bound to, hopefully, show up in front of her eventually, wherever or whenever that old vagabond was drifting around right now.

He was a little bit like a cat in that way, liable to march around for the block, but usually given to return though she could only ever claim so much of a hold over that stubborn man.

Even when he wasn't there he'd be wearing her out – So much, in fact, that she didn't notice how her mind had wandered until she was approached and spoken to from behind.

 

“Clara?”

“Oh, Danny!” she exclaimed, trying to save face but still somehow eeling like a child caught misbehaving. “You startled me a bit there, I didn't see you coming at all. What's the matter?”

“Nothing in particular.” Danny replied as he leaned against the wall next to her, a subtle playful tone in his inflection. “Just that you seem to be standing here by the window, spacing out after all the kids have left.”

“I- I guess I lost track of time.” She scrambled together, audibly embarrassed at being caught in state that did not quite live up to her standards. “Head in the clouds I guess...” she added, painfully aware of her own awkwardness.

She'd hoped that he'd find it funny and laugh it up, but instead, it seemed to have budged the conversation in a sourish direction, visibly drawing out a thought that fell over his face like a faintly darkening shadow.

“The clouds? Or was it somewhere else?”

He'd spoken with almost palpable seriousness, a clear indication that there were no jokes to be had – she felt almost admonished, but she'd hope that she was self-aware enough to recognize this perception as a side effect of her own pride, restraining herself from replying in the sort of accusatory tone that had nearly blown up their first date.

“What do you mean?”

Even before he put it into words, the nature of his suspicion was rather apparent: “Did you just come back from... traveling with him, is that it?”

The pause indicated that he, too, was exercising restraint, and she appreciated that, especially since she did have a perfectly true and wholly acceptable answer to give to him:

“No, not at all. I'd _tell_ you if that were the case...” She affirmed, watching carefully for signs of change in his demeanor, switching to further elaborations that seemed to come out as aimless bubbling: “In fact, I actually haven't seen him in a while, I wonder where he wandered off to...”

Here, too, he once again put her to shame with his amazing patience and dedication, stirring what should have been, and probably _was_ a distinct warm feeling, but wasn't without its aftertastes.

“Well, I'm not going anywhere, unless you want me to. Your place, perhaps?”

She couldn't say that she wasn't grateful, touched even, a certain head did burn beneath her cheeks at this statement but not without a certain urge to avert her eyes.

“That's... very sweet of you. Thank you.” She stated, taking care to communicate this firmly. “But I'm afraid that's ' _No_ , Thank you', I'm not really feeling like that today, I was kind of looking forward to spending a quiet evening by myself today, maybe read some books or grade some papers, I'd just be all distracted...

But we can go out tomorrow, if you want! I know just the place. I'm sure you'll like it!”

“If you say so...”

“ I don't just say so, I _promise_ you so, okay? Designated Date Night tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

 

Even though that was supposed to have been a conversation with her chosen partner, she felt tempted to sigh. Perhaps, it was because she had disappointed herself, though it may have been for a subtler, emotional reason this time, for what she'd told him had been no lie: Going home and reading was indeed her plan; Besides it building character and cultivation and what not, she felt that the occasional book did a good job at clearing and recharging her mind, and that's why it was on the list for today; Perhaps she'd brew some cocoa, too, she was not so desperate that she'd turn to binge-watching TV shows at this point.

But of course, that plan came with a significant caveat; It was honestly what she was intending to do, but only _if_ , only _unless_ , and fr some reason, she felt more cognizant of that 'If' at this moment that she had over the course of the previous days.

Wishing to clear her head even before she got to the bookshelf (or, perhaps, in case she didn't), she directed her attention to the cool afternoon air and the miscellaneous ambient sounds of city life, trying to put those things out of her mind that she didn't get to decide while focussing on those that she did.

 

Still, she was barely surprised when she unlocked her door to find the sight of a blue 1960s police box behind it, complete with a wild man tinkering with some retro-futuristic device on her kitchen table, or at least, that's what he seemed to have been doing before she came in; She could be sure as he promptly dropped everything to turn towards her.

 

“Clara!”

“Doctor!”

Then, a pause.

“I'm not missing anything that I was supposed to notice, am I?” he asked, eyes narrowed in what appeared to be serious considerations. Despite herself, Clara couldn't help but smile. “That's an unusual question.”

“ Well, it does appear to be relevant, judging on my last few visit. I'd want to rule this out preemptively. And besides, what else should I ask?”

“I don't know, how about 'How have you been'? “ she replied a little teasingly.

“How have you been then?”

“Fine. How have _you_ been?”

“Fine enough. I went to the Nevetina Galaxy!”

“Am I supposed to know where that is?”

It then seemed to dawn on him that not all people knew the designations of all Galaxies, though she doubted that he gave much thought to what she specifically would or wouldn't know – He seemed to have expected a reaction to that, nonetheless, he got his act together pretty fast and settled on a playfully cocky presentation.

“You should.”

“Aha?”

“After all, it's a Galaxy that _you_ have saved.”

“Is that so?” Needless to say, she was intrigued and after a coy moment o mock deliberation, she didn't waste a second in hopping into his time machine.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had a backlog of ideas recently & have been thinking of doing a "what the Doctor does while Clara is at work" type story for a while, before the actual show prrempted me with "The woman who lived". Even so, I found this on my harddrive recntly & decided that it might be fun to finish it anyways because I liked some of the ideas in here.  
> Once I realized that the amount of original material went beyond the scope of what I'd done in my whouffle oneshot collection I thought I#d publish it in a more general manner as I did have a lot of fun with the "exploring an ancient city" scenario. Xalax an its residents are taken from one of my original fictional universes, slightly modified to fit in the Whoniverse. Personally I'm a little proud of this particular work, in the sense that I aim to write the sort of stuff I'd like to read if it were out there - Though I hope that maybe someone else will like it, too ^^°


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